Afghanistan: Planning for Success (Transcript)

PlanningforSuccessTranscript.pdf

First Panel

MR. SENOR: Thanks, everyone, for coming. I am Dan Senor, one of the cofounders of the Foreign Policy Initiative, this morning sort of serving as a welcomer and a glorified master of ceremonies.

We are a 501(c)(3) organization. Details are available on the website foreignpolicyi.org, where you can also register for our daily overnight brief, which is a daily email with analysis and news from around the world that will be available beginning today.

We have four panels, the one beginning momentarily which Jackson will moderate, a discussion between Bob Kagan and John Nagl. Following that, we will have a panel with our other experts on the strategic context of Afghanistan with General Barno, Dr. Ashley Tellis, and Dr. Fred Kagan.

Then we are going to take a very short coffee break, after which Bill Kristol will  moderate a panel with two of our lawmakers, Representatives Jane Harman and John McHugh.

And finally we will wrap up with a lunch discussion. Bob Kagan will host the discussion, a conversation with Senator John McCain. I think lunch will either be served right before that or after that. We will have a buffet, and people can grab a quick bite and come back in.

With that, I will turn it over to Jackson Diehl, who is the deputy editorial page editor of "The Washington Post," and a bi-weekly columnist with "The Washington Post," and a world affairs journalist guru, to moderate this discussion on the appetite domestically for continued American engagement abroad.

Thanks, Jack.

MR. DIEHL: Good morning, everybody. It is great to be here. I think we will have a great series of discussions today. Where we are starting off here is with a couple of overviews on the situation in Afghanistan and the new American strategy in Afghanistan from a couple of people  who can really give us a great big-picture view of whether or not the United States should be in Afghanistan and whether or not our plan there has a good chance of working, the plan announced by the President last week.

We are very lucky to have Dr. John Nagl, who is the new president of the Center for a New American Security, a post he just took up in February. As you know, that Center has been a great supplier of talent to the current administration, including many people who helped to author the plan that President Obama announced last week for Afghanistan.

Dr. Nagl has served as an army officer in the U.S. Army for more than 20 years, retiring with the rank of lieutenant colonel. And his last military assignment was as Commander of the First Battalion in Fort Riley, Kansas, training transition teams that are embedding with Iraq and Afghani units. And he was on the writing team that produced the U.S. Counterinsurgency Field Manual that is now the basis for the strategy that  is being pursued in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Other panelists who are well-known to you all: Dr. Robert Kagan, who is a board member of the Foreign Policy Initiative, and he is also a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He has written many books, including some excellent histories of U.S. foreign policy, a breakthrough study of relations between the United States and Europe.

And so he will be addressing also the larger context of whether political support can be generated for Afghanistan. I would like to hear him talk also a little bit about whether or not our alliances there are going to help us or hurt us as we go through with this plan.

So what I am going to do is ask each of our experts to speak for about ten minutes. Then I am going to ask them each a few questions, and then we will open it up for questions from all of you in the audience.

So if I could, I would like to begin with you, Dr. Nagl.

DR. NAGL: Thank you, sir, very much. I very much appreciate the "expert" label. I want to emphasize that I consider myself to be an expert about very, very little and certainly not about Afghanistan and Pakistan.

I am a longtime student of counterinsurgency, and I am going to approach my remarks this morning from that perspective as a counterinsurgent rather than as an Afghanistan or Pakistan country expert, although I do have a little time in Afghanistan and a bunch of time working with Afghanistan forces.

I was very honored to be present on Friday when the President announced his new strategy for Afghanistan. At the risk of being accused of cheerleading, allow me to discuss briefly the ends, ways, and means of the President's proposals, with which I broadly agree. And along the way I am going to highlight a few things that I think could probably be improved. So it will be an ends, ways, and means discussion.

First, the ends. In my opinion,  American efforts in Afghanistan today have suffered from perhaps the most fundamental of all strategic errors: Insufficient resources to accomplish maximus goals. Building a liberal democracy in Afghanistan may be possible, but after 30 years of war the country simply does not have the human capital and the institutions that democracy requires.

Creating that human infrastructure is a noble, long-term enterprise for the international community, but in the meantime the United States should focus on more achievable goals: Ensuring that terrorists never again have a sanctuary in Afghan territory from which to launch attacks on the United States and our allies and preventing Afghanistan from further destabilizing its fragile neighbors, especially the nuclear arms state of Pakistan, which has suffered egregiously from horrible internal terrorist attacks over just the past several days.

The President was clear on Friday that Pakistan is both the core of the risks to American  interests and an even harder problem than Afghanistan, and I agree on both counts.

While an expanded international commitment of security and development forces can assist in the achievement of these goals in the short term, ultimately, Afghans must ensure security and stability in their own country. Building a state, even if it is a somewhat flawed state that is able to provide a modicum of security and governance to its people, is the American exit strategy from Afghanistan. Achieving those minimus goals will be hard enough. So that is the ends.

Second, the means of American policy. We desperately need the 17,000 additional U.S. soldiers that the President has committed to the fight now. But over the long term, we must transition the Afghan troops supported by American advisers for the long haul.

The first requirement, the very first requirement for success in any counterinsurgency campaign, is security for the population. This  requires boots on the ground and plenty of them. Twenty to 25 counterinsurgents for every 1,000 persons is the historically derived ratio for success according to the Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

That force ratio dictates some 600,000 counterinsurgents to protect Afghanistan, a country larger and more populous then Iraq. And that force of 600,000 is about three times larger than the current Afghan and international force.

The planned surge of 17,000 U.S. troops to conduct counterinsurgency, plus 4,000 additional trainers and advisers, is merely a downpayment on the vastly expanded force needed to protect all 30 million Afghan people. The long-term answer has to be an expanded Afghan National Army, and this is the policy I hoped to hear on Friday, but did not.

Currently at 70,000 and projected to grow to 135,000, the Afghan National Army is the most respected institution in that country. It must be expanded to 250,000 and mirrored by  sizeable local police forces to provide the security to prevent Taliban re-infiltration of the population. Building Afghan security forces will be a long-term effort that will require American assistance and advisers for many years. There is simply no viable alternative.

The 4,000 advisers that President Obama is sending to the country is a downpayment, and a long-overdue one, and a long-term effort. More troops are desperately needed in Afghanistan. The troops alone are insufficient to achieve even limited goals for American policy in Afghanistan over the next five years.

Success in counterinsurgency requires the integration of military, diplomatic and economic assistance to a country afflicted by insurgents. General McKiernan, the American Commander responsible for the International Security Assistance Force, briefed just this sort of three-legged-stool approach to a group of scholars visiting Afghanistan in November. I was proud to be one of them.

Unfortunately, General McKiernan has not been given the resources required to accomplish this mission to date. The so-called surge of civilian advisers will help accomplish the American objective of a stable Afghanistan that over time can increase when governance stops.

But it is important to note that even the 17,000 troops and the 4,000 advisers are not sufficient but are merely everything we can afford to send right now in good conscience. We don't have enough civilian advisers to send, either; and we need an expanded, long-term civilian capacity to conduct development and security assistance and governance assistance over the long haul. That is the capability we don't have in our governance to the extent we need to, and that is a capability I have been arguing for a long time.

Finally, the best way to accomplish these goals with a counterinsurgency strategy that is clear and will build and hold an enduring, democratic foundation.

The additional troops that President  Obama has committed will be successful only if they are employed correctly. To date, there have been insufficient international or Afghanistan forces to hold areas that American troops have cleared of insurgents.

As a result, the troops have had to clear the same areas repeatedly, paying a price for each operation in both American lives and in Afghan public support, which suffers from Taliban reprisals whenever we clear and leave. The troops call it mowing the lawn.

The alternative requires not just more troops but a different strategy. After an area is cleared of insurgents, it must be held by Afghan troops supported by American advisers and combat multipliers, including artillery and air support. Inside this bubble of security, the Afghanistan Government can re-establish control and build a better and more prosperous community with the help of a surge of American civilian advisers.

Since 17,000 more troops will not be enough to secure the whole country and it is going  to take a while to build a bigger Afghan Army than security requires, we are going to have to select the most important population centers to secure first. These oil spots of security will then spread over time, a long time.

The single most important reason not to think that the new strategy is a surge for Afghanistan is that the term "surge" is associated with the relatively short-term ramp-up of forces in Iraq. In Afghanistan these additional forces will be required for the long haul.

Way back in September, Admiral Mike Mullen expressed the need for more security. He said, frankly, we are running out of time. The situation is worse. And since then I have argued it is worse in Pakistan. Just over the past several weeks it has become clear on how much worse it has gotten, and the clock is still ticking.

While a surge of troops is urgently needed, they must be a component to the new strategy. This ends, ways, and means formulation  is one way to think about where we want Afghanistan to go, and what it will take for us to get there. Thank you.

MR. DIEHL: Thank you.

Robert Kagan.

DR. KAGAN: Well, thanks a lot, Jackson. Thank you all for coming out this morning for this conference. It is nice to see so many of you here on what is a pretty important day. As you know, obviously Secretary Hillary Clinton is out in The Hague meeting with other countries to discuss what to do about Afghanistan. And the question that Jackson raised, which is how much support will the United States be able to muster for this new phase in Afghanistan from its allies, is going to be an interesting question, which I will get to in a second.

First of all, let me just reiterate what I wrote recently on Jackson Diehl's page in "The Washington Post," that I think that President Obama made both a gutsy and correct decision. And it is correct not only in terms of Afghanistan,  but I think from a much larger perspective.

The United States was potentially at a tipping point, and I think still is, between a desire to continue its extensive engagement in the world that basically remains steady since the Second World War or perhaps, for a variety of reasons, some of which are obvious like the economic crisis, some of which are less obvious, perhaps having to do with the experience of the last eight years, to pull back a little bit.

I think that one of the really important aspects of the President's decision is that it definitely -- he is definitely saying "no" to pulling back. If anything, he has clearly deepened and strengthened America's commitment to a difficult conflict in a far-off part of the world of which the American people know little. And I think, in a way, this may be one of the most important decisions he makes in his presidency, because this sets the tone. You are not going to be pushing forward in a difficult conflict like Afghanistan and pulling back everywhere else. So  I think that it is important from that perspective.

And it is a gutsy decision because I think that he probably faced a certain amount of opposition within his own administration, if the papers are correct, to making this deeper commitment. I think many of his own supporters, people who voted for him, probably would have preferred that he not make this decision. And, to some extent, he will be counting on a significant amount of support from his normally political opponents. And I'm hopeful, in fact, that he will get that support. But that is a difficult thing for a President to do.

Your own side is a little nervous about what you are doing, and you have to count on support from the other side as well. That is a gutsy decision.

If John Nagl is going to disavow his expertise on this issue, then I'm going to really disavow my expertise. I'm not going to talk at all, in fact, about the details of this planned  surge in Afghanistan. We have another panel with people whose expertise is innately greater than mine, although I won't say it is innately greater than John's.

But from my perspective what really is critical about this new plan that President Obama has laid out is that it is not the minimalist approach that some of his advisers recommended. I think there has been an attempt to spin it that way, in some cases especially with "The New York Times" extremely successfully, as a kind of minimal counterterrorism operation. You know, no more nation building. But I think that is clearly not the case. I think this is very much along the lines of a nation-building exercise.

I think that Secretary Clinton either just today or yesterday made this statement in The Hague, or maybe it was on the plane out to The Hague: ""A government that cannot deliver for its people is a terrorist's best recruiting tool."

Now, a government that cannot deliver is what we are trying to avoid; but in order for a  government to be able to deliver, that is a very extensive commitment. President Obama, in his statement announcing this plan, talked about a whole range of issues, including the really broad sense of being able to help the Afghan people fulfill the promise of a better future by rooting out government corruption, helping the elective government provide basic services, fighting the narcotics trade, and, in general, advancing security, opportunity, and justice.

Now, people point out that the word "democracy" is not there. I know that now, because of the Bush years, we have an allergy to the word "democracy." But I would argue that I have a hard time understanding how the Afghani people will feel that they have achieved the promise of a better future and security, opportunity and justice under some kind of brutal dictator that we allow to be set up or allow to occur to take power in Afghanistan, or a series of warlords by whom they will be governed.

It seems to me that whether you use the  term "democracy" or not, you are talking about what Secretary of Defense Robert Gates referred to as a legitimate, representative government. And I think that that is, in fact, what the Barack Obama Administration is aiming for, and I think that is why we are seeing an increase in civilian resources.

And, by the way, I entirely agree that the effort in Afghanistan has been under-resourced in recent years for a variety of reasons, which we can get into.

So, therefore, not only has President Obama made a commitment to Afghanistan and this difficult conflict, but he has made a commitment to a real counterinsurgency strategy. That is the way the Under Secretary of Defense Michèle Flournoy described it in her post announcing the briefing. She called it a counterinsurgency strategy, and it is a counterinsurgency strategy. The idea of a clear hold and build is, in fact, I think critical. I think that is what the Administration is about.

Whether it has, itself, devoted enough resources to that is an interesting question, one that I think the next panel can take up in greater detail.

Now, will this policy be able to sustain support in the United States? I mean I addressed that briefly. There clearly, on both the right and the left, is an allergy to this kind of commitment. And at a time of economic distress, one can worry that at some point there will be somebody out there of some political significance getting angry about the money and the resources that are being devoted to this difficult conflict. And it is going to be difficult because we are not going to see a tremendous amount of progress, I suspect, very soon.

So the capacity to make political hay out of this issue, really on either side of the spectrum, I think, is great. And while I personally don't believe there is a real isolationist tradition in the United States, it is hard for me to think of a single administration  for the last 100 years and more that truly attempted to pursue an isolationist approach to the world.

The isolationist critique of American foreign policy is always strong. It is usually found in an opposition party. If you look at what happened from the first Bush Administration through the present Administration, the Republicans were big internationalists and interventionists. They intervened in Iraq, and they intervened in Panama. The Democrats, as you may recall, were almost entirely in opposition. There were only ten votes for the first Gulf War from the Democratic party.

So then Bill Clinton comes in. The Republicans become neo-isolationists. The Democrats become the party of intervention. You remember Condoleeza Rice's famous critique of the Clinton Administration policies in 2000, saying that the 82nd Airborne should not be walking kids to school; no more nation- building; we have to look out for own interests.

We turn around; the Bush Administration comes in. Now the Bush Administration are the interventionists and the Democrats, I think, after -- and, by the way, I'm not suggesting that there are not reasons why people change their minds, but basically the Democrats become the anti-interventionist party.

Well, now the Democrats are back in. The first move of the new President is to deepen a commitment in a foreign intervention.

So will the Republicans follow the traditional pattern here and move into a call for bringing the boys home and a reduced American commitment overseas? That is an interesting question. It remains to be seen. All I can say is that, as for myself and I think some other voices, we are certainly in favor of supporting President Obama in doing the right thing in Afghanistan.

So as for the allies, I know you mentioned the allies. You know, I don't expect a great deal from the allies, and I don't think the  Obama Administration expects a great deal from the allies. I think we are moving into a period of what I am almost tempted to call "the soft unilateralism of low expectation."

(Laughter.)

DR. KAGAN: It sounds good, doesn't it? It's a nice phrase. I kind of like it.

Which is to say it is not that we are not consulting with the allies. It is not that we don't want to be nice to the allies. We go to the allies; we say. Can you please do this; they say, well, really no. And we say, okay, and we will go do it ourselves.

That is basically where we can -- we are not doing it ourselves in Afghanistan, obviously. But I suspect that we are not going to really press the allies very hard for more troops, and that we are just going to wind up increasing the ratio of American troops to European troops quite substantially over the next couple of years.

Personally from a geopolitical point of view, I think this is acceptable. I worry about  its consequences from a political point of view, because if you now go back to the American domestic context, if the war is difficult, if the war is expensive, if the economic crisis proceeds -- and it is painfully obvious that the allies are not really willing to do as much as we wish they would do -- the twofold effect of that could be to undermine support for the allies, on the one hand, and undermine support for the overall operation, on the other.

Why does the United States not have to do this all by itself? I'm hopeful that won't come up, but I do worry that it will come up. And when I have spoken to European audiences and European officials, I have wanted to warn them that even if the Obama Administration is doing nothing but smiling at them, the American people may get a little disenchanted if the appearance is that they are not carrying their fair share.

So I will leave it there. Thanks.

MR. DIEHL: Thanks very much. And I would like to get the discussion going now. I  would like to start by bringing up this question, this very interesting question that Robert Kagan just raised: Is this nation-building or not that we are up to now in Afghanistan?

And, Dr. Nagl, I would like to ask you about this because you spoke in your remarks about minimalist goals, about achievable goals; and certainly that is the rhetoric we have been hearing from the Administration. And in his speech last Friday, President Obama laid out what sounded like a pretty minimalist goal, which is simply to prevent al-Qaeda from becoming entrenched again in Afghanistan or the Taliban from taking the power again.

And, yet, I spent last week in Afghanistan myself, and when you talk to commanders there, it is very clear that they have completely imbibed and absorbed the counterinsurgency strategy that you helped to author, which envisions getting to a goal like that by building governance, by reforming the Afghan economy, by a complete revamping of aid  programs that take a much more comprehensive approach, by conducting a whole lot of what sounds like nation-building.

And it seems to me that what commanders there have come to understand and what the Administration seems to have incorporated into its strategy is the idea that if you want to achieve the minimalist goal of preventing al-Qaeda from coming back, you have to, in fact, take on the rather maximum task of nation-building.

Is that right?

DR. NAGL: I think there is great truth to that, Jackson. But the fact is that we can accomplish our more minimalist goals of preventing Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for terrorists without accomplishing the goals of nation- building or comprehensive counterinsurgency, but only so long as we stay there, so long as the United States is prepared to have a permanent commitment to maintaining troops inside Afghanistan. But we can't accomplish our counterterrorism objectives without conducting  nation-building.

If we ever wanted to leave, we are going to have to build an Afghanistan that can accomplish those goals on its own. And the primary component of that, the primary component of building an Afghan State that can secure itself, is going to be an army. And we need to then build, frankly, an Afghan Government that is worthy of its army, the Afghan Government that is the most effective, best-respected institution in their country.

That is a long-term project, but these are long, hard wars. And so the politically unacceptable, incorrigible words of "nation building," I think, are being disguised by what is, in essence, a long-term commitment to do that.

Let me push back a little bit again, Bob, if I can comment on the international role. I believe that both the Brits and the Australians are likely to increase their commitment. It may be advisers rather than so-called combat forces; but, as those who advise know, that looks an awful  lot like combat. Canadians have a higher casualty ratio per soldier deployed than the United States does. The Dutch have also performed remarkably well. You always hate to credit anyone specifically, because you then, by implication, denigrate the efforts of 41 other countries, the 41 total countries involved in this effort.

And I think it is important to think of Afghanistan and Pakistan not just in light of those two countries, but also in terms of this long war, what we are now calling an "overseas contingency operation." Apparently I still prefer the phrase "a long war." I will admit to never having been a fan of the phrase "global war on terror."

But if, in fact, we continue to be confronted by al-Qaeda and its affiliated movements which remain dedicated to doing us and our friends harm -- and I strongly believe that that is the case -- then the fact that there are 40 countries engaged in an effort against that is incredibly important, regardless of the material  contributions those countries make. And some of those material contributions are more significant than others. All of them are significant.

But in terms of winning this global narrative, I think that it is incredibly important that we have that many countries engaged in this effort with us. I do agree that increasingly the Americans are going to bear a higher percentage of the total weight, but to quote someone who will not otherwise be quoted here, "From each according to his abilities."

(Laughter.)

DR. NAGL: We all have a role to play in this fight. And I also believe that the President is going to ask for more, and it is going to be very hard for our allies internationally to say "no" to this President when he asks for more in what I really believe is a global struggle.

MR. DIEHL: Robert, you may want to respond to that.

And I also want to ask, again, following up on this nation-building discussion, if what we  are really doing there is nation-building? Is it politically smart to pretend that that is not what we are doing?

DR. KAGAN: Well, in answer to -- on the allies question, you know, as I say, I am comfortable with what the allies are doing, and I totally agree that it is important to maintain as much of the international elements of this for all the reasons that you stated. And I hope that your line will be repeated early and often by the Administration, even if the allies do not quite cough up everything we want, just so we can

maintain basic support in the United States.

But I was recently at a meeting at the Brussels forum in Brussels where one of the senior German officials got up and said, well, you know, the Germans have been in the north, and the north is now completely pacified.

(Laughter.)

DR. KAGAN: And the audience, which was almost entirely European, laughed like that, and he didn't mean it as a joke.

(Laughter.)

DR. KAGAN: So some of this is a German problem, obviously.

(Laughter.)

DR. KAGAN: In the sense that I think that is the country that people are looking at and maybe forgetting about, as you say, the role of the British and the Australians and others, which has been significant.

So, on the nation-building question, you know, there are people who are in the White House being paid to make smart political decisions, and I'm not prepared to -- I mean, I know there that has been a fair amount of criticism, and I intend to be concerned that you are doing one thing, and you are selling something else.

On the other hand, let me make the argument for this tactic. The thing that they are selling is not insignificant. But if there saying to the American people this is about al-Qaeda and not getting hit again, you can sustain that for a long time. So that even if you are, in fact,  engaged in a nation-building exercise and you are calling it a moral anti-al-Qaeda exercise, that might be enough.

I mean I think they found the point to make that is not easily dismissed by the American people. So as long as he keeps making that point -- which by the way, is going to make him, as it already has, raise the political salience of the war formerly known as the war on terrorism -- that will have interesting implications on other issues as well. I think that that is interesting.

I think that you sometimes got the feeling during the campaign that had this Administration had its druthers, it would have shifted emphasis dramatically to something else. The need to to do what he is doing in Afghanistan has forced him to put al-Qaeda front and center again in a way that I am not sure was what they had in mind. I think that is a good thing. So it may, in fact, be sustainable.

MR. DIEHL: I just want to follow up on the politics of this a little bit. Another thing  I heard when I was in Afghanistan was a lot of concern among U.S. Commanders, U.S. civilian professionals about how sustainable the bipartisan political support for this was going to be in the United States.

I heard one person say that, you know, he had been warned by a senior Republican Senator that this year the war in Afghanistan is a bipartisan war. Next year it will be Obama's war. And particularly in 2010, if we are continuing to see heavy fighting, heavy casualties during the summer season, which, frankly, many people expect, that that will be the time when Republican Senators who used to support this war and who supported the war in Iraq will suddenly decide that this is Obama's war and that he is messing it up.

Is that something we have to be concerned about; do you think?

DR. KAGAN: I think it is something we have to be concerned about. And, again, I think they might find some allies even in the Democratic  Party, and certainly you might find some in the Democratic Party saying, we have got to get off of this issue, because we don't want to run on this issue in 2010.

I mean there is also the danger of pre-emptive political surrender, which is in the face of a potential backlash you begin to pare back.

I mean, look, in the Iraq context Republicans on the Hill were very shaky and, themselves, not wanting to run amiss; and some of them have turned out with good reason for not wanting to run on. And so, you know, politics does come into play; and, you know, about that potential development, the stronger we can build a consensus in favor of the continuing commitment to Afghanistan now, the less likely it will be for people to fall off later, I think.

MR. DIEHL: John Nagl, you have a lot of friends in the Administration. How solid is the support for the strategy of counterinsurgency for fixing Afghanistan as opposed to, say,  counterterrorism? We hear a lot that there are people in the Administration, perhaps including the Vice President, who would prefer not to go the route of counterinsurgency.

DR. NAGL: The extraordinary thing for me on Friday -- and I don't think the television cameras showed this particularly well, but the President had his entire national security team behind him when he gave this speech: General Jones, Bruce Riedel, Michèle Flournoy, my former boss, Secretary of Defense Gates, Secretary of State Clinton, all behind him shoulder to shoulder.

And the statement was, I thought, very clear and very unmistakable, the President very resolute; and he committed his Administration to this fight. This was an all-end statement. I do not believe that this Administration will waiver. And I do think that meetings like this, gatherings like this, bipartisan groups of people dedicated to the security of the American people, the defeat of our enemies around the world, really truly  believe in that.

So I think forming what -- there used to be a bipartisan consensus in this country on foreign policy, in particular when we have our sons and daughters at war. And I am hopeful that events like this will contribute to that. That is why I am so proud to be a part of it.

The people I have talked to in the Administration understand counterinsurgency. They understand that the long-term objective has to be building into Afghanistan -- and into Pakistan even more difficult -- the ability to secure themselves. They understand how long and how hard that effort is going to be. But they understand that there simply is not any alternative if we are ever going to withdraw in large numbers from this conflict. So it presents what to me is the most clear and present danger to the security of our country.

So I think they understand all of that. I think that there is, perhaps, some unwillingness to talk about the full extent of the time  commitment that is likely to be required for this. But as an initial statement of the result and determination, I thought it was hard to beat what the President did on Friday.

MR. DIEHL: Well, there are a lot more questions, but I see we have a huge number of really expert people in the audience here. So I want to open it up to questions from the audience. There will be a roving microphone. And the only thing I ask is that before you ask your question, you simply identify yourself.

Who would like to go first?

MR. CRUTZOS: My name is Demetrius Crutzos. I am with Global for Local Strategies. I was formally the Country Director for the International Republican Institute in Afghanistan.

My question is regarding the upcoming presidential elections in Afghanistan and the potential, both political in the United States and strategic, on-the-ground ramifications for the Obama Administration regarding the question of:  Do we support President Karzai, or do we look for someone else, especially when with all of the current president's shortcomings most of the presidential candidates that are being talked about have some pretty visible warts?

I am very curious to hear the panelists' thoughts on both the upcoming elections but, more specifically, what the ramifications could be for the Obama Administration.

MR. DIEHL: John Nagl. When I was just there, just to add to that, I heard a lot of paradoxical things about the election. People seemed to say that, on the one hand, Karzai is quite unpopular in many parts of Afghanistan because people blame him for government inefficiency and corruption.

On the other hand, he is likely to be re-elected, and Afghans are likely to blame us for the fact that he gets re-elected if we don't appear to back anyone else. How do you manage this kind of problem?

DR. NAGL: Anyone who is married knows that  it is always your fault. I am going to get in trouble for that.

(Laughter.)

DR. NAGL: Bob talked a little bit earlier about the democracy, and I think it is worth pointing out that the Administration just committed $40 million to assist in the Afghanistan presidential elections. And we are expecting $160 million from other countries to help with that.

This election, to coin a phrase, is an accountability moment. And we are either going to see, I believe -- I believe that there is going to be a real election. There are real candidates lining themselves up. There are going to be real alternatives to Karzai. The Afghanistan people I have spoken to, when I asked them who is likely to be elected to be president, they always answered whoever the United States picks.

So we are having -- I have talked about the human infrastructure problem a little bit. It is a little hard in some cases to get them to understand that it really is their choice. We  really do mean that.

I believe that either President Karzai will improve his performance, which has been lackluster, to say the least, and universally derided as the Mayor of Kabul -- he will either improve his performance over the next three or four months through the summer, or he will not be re-elected. I do not believe the United States is going to put its thumb on the scales.

I think the elections will be as free and as fair as they can be in that troubled country. The 17,000 troops are going to primarily provide security for the elections. That was the reason why the deployment process had to start before the completion of the Afghan strategy review.

And so whether we have Karzai or whether he is replaced, I believe it will have to be a better Karzai if he is re-elected, or I think there are other credible candidates. I was able to chair, honored to chair, a committee and met -- I had a press conference a month or two ago --  someone who has the obvious credentials and a lot of credibility. Arshar Khani is a man who has the intellectual capacity to do a lot of the technical responsibilities.

So I think there are credible alternatives. I really think it will be up to the Afghan people to decide, although convincing them of that is going to be a real trick.

MR. DIEHL: Robert Kagan. We found ourselves in this situation before.

DR. KAGAN: Yes, many times.

MR. DIEHL: El Salvador, Vietnam, Iran. How do you manage the situation where either we pick somebody or we don't pick somebody, and we avoid being looked upon as the public master either way?

DR. KAGAN: In countries where the United States is deeply involved, it is impossible not to look like the puppet master, unless your worst enemy gets elected. We have achieved that in El Salvador.

(Laughter.)

DR. KAGAN: It just took a while to validate the true democracy that was established in El Salvador. I actually mean that sincerely.

(Laughter.)

DR. KAGAN: And so, if the Afghan people are going to assume that whatever happens in these elections is what we wanted to happen -- and I think there is nothing we can do to avoid that. And I'm not sure we should bend over backwards to try to avoid it unless we really were prepared to pick a different candidate, which I think is too late to do now. I mean to to pick a candidate.

So I would say I agree with John. I think that our obligation at this point is to try to make sure that the elections are as free and fair and certified -- as free and fair as possible; whoever wins, wins. And then whoever wins, if it is Karzai or somebody else, is going to have to deal with the problems and may be the beneficiary of an improved American strategy, in which case a lot of the downside of having Karzai, if it is Karzai, in power may be mitigated.

MR. CONSTANTINO: My name is Phillip Constantino. My question is: You have talked about Karzain and the very narrow kinds of goals in Afghanistan and slightly the broader, entire kinds of insurgency goals. But could you talk a little bit briefly about how Afghanistan fits into the security goals of the United States in sort of a global way? Is there something to be gained by being determined or sort of leaving as soon as possible?

MR. DIEHL: Do you want to take that?

DR. NAGL: By leaving as soon as possible?

MR. CONSTANTINO: To what we would be thought about, the way the rest of the world will view our prestige and commitment if we are very, I guess, publicly willing to accept that we leave Afghanistan absolutely as soon as possible, regardless of what our objectives are?

DR. NAGL: It is important to talk, I think, about the popularity of the United States in Afghanistan. We have fallen dramatically, but  we remain above 50 percent, the approval ratings in Afghanistan. That exceeds President Karzai, whose ratings are in the single digits, and the Taliban, who are also in the single digits. So the Taliban is not a popular alternative in Afghanistan.

The Afghans that I have spoken to are not upset that the United States is there. They are upset that we don't stay, and we are not there in sufficient numbers. And I think they are likely to start changing that.

So certainly in that country there is no hurry for us to leave. They would like more ground security, particularly more provided by Afghans and fewer air strikes. And I feel the same way about my neighborhood.

It is important as well to note that Peter Bergen had a good piece over the weekend, Afghanistan is not the graveyard of empires that it has been classified before. They tend not to respond well if you sell land mines designed to kill children, and my neighborhood agrees that  with philosophy. But, in fact, there is widespread appreciation that the United States is trying to help and to try to do the right things.

The real danger here and the reason Afghanistan is so important -- and Afghanistan, it is an extraordinary moment. It doesn't happen that often, but American interests and American ideals actually both go the same direction in Afghanistan and Pakistan. So we are fighting a horrible enemy who does horrible things. While I was in Afghanistan in November, that was when some Talibans -- I am blanking out the expletives here -- sprayed "S" on the faces of some girls who were going to school.

So we have almost a cartoon enemy who is so horrible, who does such horrible things, that it is really hard to argue that we should not be there for humanitarian reasons to help this godforsaken, poor country, the fifth poorest country in the world, just devastated by 30 years of war.

But American national interests also  demand that we be there. A stable Afghanistan does not guarantee a stable Pakistan, by any means. But an unstable Afghanistan does contribute to instability in Pakistan. And instability in Pakistan, of which there is already a surplus, is not something we want to encourage and, frankly, not something the international community wants to encourage.

So, I actually think we are going to see an increased international commitment. I think the Obama strategy announced on Friday, already recognized with some approval by President Karzai, will achieve an awful lot of international consensus. So I don't think there is going to be extraordinary international pressure for us to leave soon.

I also think events like -- the more you know about Afghanistan and Pakistan -- the more the American people know, the more committed I believe they will be to a continued American presence there for what I believe will be the decade that is going to be required to stabilize  that region.

DR. KAGAN: Well, I think this is true of both Iraq and Afghanistan. However anxious or unhappy much of the world may be about our continuing presence in these places, it will be less than their anxiousness and anxiety and anger if we pull out and leave them to blow up into a million pieces. And so let's not overestimate the pleasure that will be gained.

If we withdraw from Afghanistan prematurely and it becomes an al-Qaeda base again and it becomes a Taliban disaster area again, the world will not be grateful.

So, I think we have to just bear -- you know, we have to bear the burden of world unhappiness with some of our actions without kidding ourselves that the world will thank us if we leave it in a mess.

MR. DIEHL: On that cheerful note --

(Laughter.)

MR. DIEHL: -- we have come to the end of our time for this panel, but there is much more  discussion to come. So thank you very much to Dr. John Nagl and to Robert Kagan.

(Applause.)

Second Panel

MR. SENOR: We are going to get started if people can take a seat, please. One quick housekeeping note. A couple of people during this last panel asked me where to get more information about the organization.

Jamie Fly -- is somewhere, I'm not sure where he is -- there he is -- is the policy director for the Foreign Policy Initiative. By all means, feel free to ask him questions. And I was remised in not doing this before, thanking him and Margaret Hoover and their team for pulling together this conference on relatively short notice. So thank you to both and to everyone involved.

This panel, we are going to broaden the discussion a little bit, dealing, obviously, with Afghanistan, but also the regional -- more of the regional context as well as it relates to Pakistan and the border areas.

The panel we have here includes Retired  Lieutenant General David Barno, who for over a year and-a-half was commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and had central command jurisdiction over Afghanistan, Pakistan and the southern parts of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. He has served in just about every role from lieutenant up to lieutenant general. He is now the director of the northeast -- I'm sorry the NESSA studies program at the Center for Strategic Studies at National Defense University and a prolific writer and analyst, and brings his perspective of the over a year-and-a-half that he served in the region beginning in October of 2003.

Dr. Fred Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for defense and security studies, and before that, a professor and associate professor for military history at West Point, and is widely regarded as one of the key analysts and architects involved in the development of the surge strategy of the United States adopted in late 2006 and early 2007.

And Dr. Ashley Tellis, who many of you  know, is also like Dr. Bob Kagan, at the Carnegie Endowment. He was senior director for South Asian affairs at that National Security Council, formerly with the Rand Corporation, and has written extensively not just about Afghanistan but the regional implications and consequences of what we do in Afghanistan.

With that I thought we would start with Ashley to provide some regional context, and then we will go to General Barno, and then wrap up with Fred Kagan. Then we will open up the floor.

DR. TELLIS: Thank you, Dan. It is a pleasure to be here this morning. Let me start off by offering some brief thoughts about policy as a whole that President Obama unveiled last week. I think I would echo something that Bob Kagan said earlier.

This was a courageous and responsible policy suddenly in comparison to all the hypocrisy that preceded. But it is a policy today that is afflicted by some understandable ambiguities and unresolved dilemmas. And I want to touch on all  of these dimensions in the next minutes.

You remember the debates before the President unveiled the policy. There were three competing arguments that were essentially vying for American attention. The first was to pursue a policy in Afghanistan that would focus on counterterrorism in a very narrow sense.

The second was to focus on al-Qaeda but reach some sort of an accommodation with the Taliban and laid out this position as clearly as anyone could in the last few months.

And the third was, of course, the policy of simply exiting Afghanistan altogether, of course in a graceful way. And this argument was laid out by in the piece that he wrote in "The New York Times" several weeks ago.

I think it is really to President Obama's credit that he has committed the United States to essentially stay the course, in fact, deepening our objectives in Afghanistan, even though the packaging has been both clever and cute. The packaging has focused on defeating  al-Qaeda and the Taliban, because the President refers to at several points in the speech of the need to avoid for return to Taliban rule, for all the consequences that it has for the United States.

And it is a policy that he has anchored very clearly, I think on the right basis as well, which is making certain that this part of the world ceases to be a source of threats to the United States and the international community at large. These are objectives that people understand, and therefore, I think it is important that the President stated this in the words that he did.

Now, the debate has, of course, has risen as to whether this policy means we are getting out of the nation building business. My own view is very akin to the view that Bob articulated in the last session, and that is we are involved in nation building in every way. And if you look at the white paper that the Administration has put out, among the two  objectives that are upper most identified in the white paper are the need to build an accountable and responsible government and to build national security forces. If this does not constitute a definition of building an effective gun state, then I'm not quite sure what is.

Let me say a few words about the ambiguities. There are ambiguities, and the ambiguities to my mind come here within at least along three dimensions. First, of course, is the refusal to own up to the fact that we are going to be involved in state building for a long time.

The second, which I think is potentially more problematic, is the unwillingness to admit that we have to stay in Afghanistan for the long term. This is implicit in the President's project, but it is never clearly stated either in his formal remarks or in the white paper that the Administration issued.

And the third ambiguity, which again was circumvented, was the refusal to say anything about the need for building a responsive or a  democratic government.

Now, oddly enough, if you look at the Administration's project, the Administration is committed to doing each of these three things. And so, we find ourselves in the somewhat peculiar position that we are committed to doing something in deeds but not necessarily in -- to my mind, of course, a rose is a rose and by any way it sounds just as good to me.

Let me say a few words about the unresolved dilemmas. I think there are four unresolved dilemmas that we need to address as we work in the months ahead.

The first is the whole question of reconciliation with Taliban, which appears in the Administration's white paper. My own view is that reconciliation with the Taliban is likely to fail. It is certainly likely to fail because the Taliban has no interest in that. But even more importantly, it is likely to fail because it cannot succeed in the present circumstances.

Reconciliation with the Taliban, in my  view, cannot occur through some kind of negotiated compromise, but only through making the situation in the Afghanistan so much better that individual insurgents then progressively stop defecting from the insurgency to the government.

And so, if one wants to think about reconciliation, I think it is more useful to think of reconciliation as essentially the end product of a successful investment in state building, and rather than to invest up front in efforts as the Administration proposes, to engage in reconciliation, even with low level Taliban.

The second unresolved dilemma is the question of Pakistan. The white paper and the President's remarks describe the need, obviously, to have the right policy towards Pakistan, and to move Pakistan from the currently destructive course that it is locked into, into a course that is more favorable both to itself and to the United States.

But neither the remarks of the President nor the white paper actually identifies how we are  going to go about doing this. The fact that we have not succeeded in helping Pakistan move off its currently treacherous course is not for want of effort in the last Administration, but simply because the task is so difficult and because it implicates the interest of very powerful organizations within the Pakistan state.

There is nothing that I have seen so far in the Administration's approach that suggests that we have a better policy towards Pakistan and that we will have a better policy towards Pakistan than the one that we have had so far. And unless this is again an issue that is engaged, I think we will have difficulties in getting to be in the state that we want.

The third ambiguity is, of course, the whole problem about the number of troops that will be acquired and the need to build up a national security forces. I personally found it disappointing, as John Nagl said, that the President did not take the opportunity to commit to a larger indigenous national security force.  Nor did he identify the possibility that more American troops would be required for the much longer period of time than is currently participated.

The fourth ambiguity, which will need to be addressed, is the issues pertaining to commander control, which in Afghanistan are particularly vexatious at multiple levels and involve not simply how the military effort is managed, but also the very difficult challenges of integrating both the civilian efforts of reconstruction with the military challenges of counterinsurgency.

We have not done a good job of this so far. The Administration seems to recognize it. It talks about the need to do this right. But again, there is nothing that has surfaced that suggests to us how it proposes to fix this problem.

And the fifth ambiguity, which refers to one of the question that was raised in the last panel, is the issue of the elections. This is  critical because the elections could turn out to be a turning point in Afghanistan. And U.S. policy, to the best of my knowledge, has not given enough thought to how we want to manage the question of a possible Karzai reelection.

I think there are things that can be done, that the United States ought to do, including providing financial security support for all of the contenders in the Afghan election, providing them with the resources that, in a sense, levels the playing field, and gives the other contenders an opportunity to confront Karzai in an open context. These are the kinds of things that we need to do. Unfortunately, we have not given this issue some thought, and I think that will come back to haunt us.

Over the longer term, and I'm going to end on this note, the real question I think is going to be less what did the Administration's rhetoric about our commitments in Afghanistan and Pakistan are going to be, because at least thus far we have the rhetoric right. The real issue is  whether we are going to actually put our money where our mouth is and actually find the resources to sustain this fight that we have committed ourselves to.

There are going to be pressures from the American public, there are going to be pressures from the Hill, there are going to be pressures from the Europeans over a period of time to rattle our objectives. We have to be steadfast, and the President has to be steadfast. He has said all of the right things. I think the next few months will show whether we can actually make good on promises.

Thank you.

MR. SENOR: General Barno.

LIEUTENANT GENERAL BARNO: Thanks, Dan. It is great to have the opportunity to talk on a topic today that I spent a good bit of my recent life certainly involved with. I was out to visit Afghanistan in January of this year for several days and regional command south and got to go to Sargodha province, Kandahãr and Helmand province  and see firsthand for the first time in a couple of years what things look like there.

Also my youngest son just returned from a year in Afghanistan. So the family continues its personal commitment to success in that region, and I suspect he will be going back at some point down the road.

As Dan noted, I am at the National Defense University, and as a Defense Department person, my comments today will be my own. These are my own thoughts as opposed to anything reflecting current policy.

So with that let me, pose, perhaps, four challenges as we look at the road ahead here in Afghanistan, and then close with a few comments on Pakistan, which we have only briefly spoke to there this morning so far; four challenges.

And as I listened to the President's remarks at the White House on Friday and then heard a bit of the follow-on conversations with senior Administration officials later in the day, it is clear that the next major step in front of  the Administration is now implementation of this new policy. So the challenges I want to talk -- to focus on that very issue.

The first I think goes right to the heart of this thought of a counterinsurgency strategy, and that is the Afghan people is the center of gravity of our newly rollback strategy here. What does that mean and how are we going to implement the security of the Afghan people in particular?

One point of the huge challenges that we have had over the last several years is the increasing violence of the Taliban in contrast to a very limited and oftentimes fixed up number of American, International and Afghan troops. Those numbers have grown; the Afghan army and police have grown, but they have not grown commensurate with the levels of violence that have been increased around the country.

So, if, in fact, the core of our counterinsurgency strategy is protecting the population, a fundamental implementation challenge  would be to understand how to do that in Afghanistan over the next one, two, three years. We have heard implicitly that there is going to be a commitment to growing, perhaps an accelerating growth, of Afghanistan security forces. But as all of us who have been involved with that enterprise realize, that is a time-consuming effort. Not trading off quality and effectiveness as you ramp up the speed with which you produce and help those forces grow is a critical component.

So, how do we fill that gap between now and the time that adequate Afghanistan security forces will be available, which undoubtedly will be several years from now? How do we fill that security gap in terms of our focus on protecting the Afghanistan population?

As we found in Iraq, where we had a vast majority of Iraqi population in urban areas, we had to tailor a very carefully designed program focused primarily on the cities to protect the population there.

In Afghanistan, which is a nation about 50 percent larger in land mass than Iraq and about 4 million people greater in population, the vast majority of the population are not in cities. They are in the rural areas. And that makes the complexity of that population security requirement all the more difficult.

The second challenge I think we have now in implementation is how to create true unity of effort. We have talked about unity of effort at length over the last several years. And as John Nagl noted this morning, there are 41 different nations involved just in the military enterprise in Afghanistan.

There are several hundred, some would argue over a thousand non-governmental organizations. There is a widely disparate number of other civilian international agencies in Afghanistan. Our challenge is not too few players in Afghanistan. In some ways the challenge is too many players. And we have had immense difficulty in achieving that fundamental military principle  on the military side, unity of command, unity of effort simply on the military side because of the number of actors that when we multiply that into civilian dimension, it becomes even more complex.

So, what are we going to do in implementation now of the new strategy to fuse this effort together? Are we going to look at different organizational structures? Are we going to realign and refocus the leadership in some ways? We clearly are going to commit more people both in the civilian side and the military side, and it appears we are going to put in some very senior U.S. players on both of those enterprises.

But how are we going to ensure that two years from now, three years from now we are not in the same problems that we have today, which is there are so many people that want to help and so many people that are involved that we still can't achieve a synergy where the whole is more than simply a sum of the parts? Some would argue -- I think Secretary Gates said this past year in Afghanistan the reality has been the whole it has  been less than the sum of the parts. We cannot simply use the same models, it seems to me, as we move down the road ahead.

The third, I think, challenge implementation is how to ensure that we can execute effectively both top down and bottoms up in Afghanistan. A tremendous amount of our effort over the last six or seven years has been centrally focused on Kabul and trying to improve aspects of the Afghan central government with the belief that if we do that, then we will be able to extend those capabilities out into the provinces.

Now, we have had, I think, uneven effort, in part because of the number of players on the bottoms up part of that. What does it look like at the village level, what does it look like at the district level? How are we going to organize that, perhaps, differently in the next two to three years?

I would particularly argue that in the south, as we merge and look at this unified civil military effort in what I call the  counterinsurgency zone in the country, the southern half of Afghanistan, which is distinct from the stability zone, the northern half of Afghanistan, where we have a very different, really a peacekeeping like challenge.

In the south we are fighting a war. It is a counterinsurge enterprise. And that zone and the requirements in that zone, the violence, the security requirements are dramatically different than they are in the northern half of the country.

How do we organize our military and civil enterprise down there from the bottoms up to unify military and civil action? I would argue that in a violent zone in the midst of a war there is a need for the military to take a leadership role, partnered with the supporting civilian effort in the south, not simply separate stovepipes that complement each other in some fashion.

This has got to be a focused unified effort, not unlike where we found some success in the American provincial reconstruction team  linkage to the military maneuver enterprise in the eastern part of the country. We have to look at that, I think, in some new ways across the whole of the south.

The final challenge of implementation, I think, is the challenge of time. The clock is running. It is not entirely clear, I think, to all of the actors involved, be it the Afghans, be it the United States military, be it NATO, be it all of those other players in Afghanistan, how much time is available on the clock in order to achieve if not success, at least a turnaround in the trajectory in Afghanistan.

How much time do we really have? When does our political will in Europe, and the United States, even among the Afghan people, trickle to a point where we no longer have the energy to sustain this effort? In all of our plans the implementation of our policy now has to be shaped in a way that understands that this is on a finite time line. I'm not sure what the answer to that question is. But we cannot develop an  implementation plan without a clear understanding of the time line that we are on.

If we build a five-year plan and we only have three years of time in the hourglass, this is not going to succeed. So I think that is a crucial challenge as we now look at recasting this broad policy into the operationalzing, as it has been put, of the policy into a plan of on the ground.

Finally, a quick comment on Pakistan and we have not fully -- simply briefly touched on that today. One could argue that Pakistan will present to the United States with its greatest strategic challenge in the region today. And realizing we are focused this morning on Afghanistan, I think we have to recognize that success in Afghanistan will create leverage and I think provide us additional capabilities to achieve success in Pakistan.

I don't personally accept the notion that the conflict in Afghanistan somehow is a subset of a broader set of challenges in Pakistan.  And I also don't personally believe that solving Pakistan will somehow allow us to solve Afghanistan. They are clearly interrelated. But the reality is we have, in my judgment, much more influence today inside of Afghanistan, and our prospects for turning that around are quite good if we aggressively implement the policy from last Friday. That success in Afghanistan will give us tremendous leverage in terms of where we want to go in Pakistan.

On the reverse of that, of course, failure in Afghanistan, as we heard from earlier speakers, will simply move Pakistan more rapidly down a slope towards further problems in that nation.

So, I think we have to look at Pakistan independently in a sense from Afghanistan in a related regional strategy. And part of our look at Pakistan with regard to the United States has to be how do we convince the Pakistanis that the U.S. is a long-term strategic partner with them in the region?

So much of their decision-making, in my view, is based upon the expectation that the Americans are simply requesting to walk out of the door at some point. How do we disabuse them of that notion? How do we build confidence that we are there for the long haul and that they can change their calculus to reflect that fact? That will give us a tremendous degree of increase capability in the prospects for success in Pakistan. And again, our success in Afghanistan I think will be a key component of that. Thank you.

MR. SENOR: Thank you, General Barno.

And next we have Fred Kagan, who just returned from Afghanistan, spent almost a month there. I will turn it over to you.

DR. KAGAN: Thank you, Dan. Actually, I spent about five days in Afghanistan, and another nine days in Iraq. And I apologize for the noises I have been making. I seemed to have brought back a souvenir.

I want to start off by saying I fully support the President's stated policy, and I will  work as far to help this President succeed as I worked to help previous presidents succeed, or rather to help his policy succeed, because I think it is absolutely important, absolutely vital to American security. And I hope and believe this actually can be a bipartisan effort and can remain a bipartisan effort, because it is so clearly in the nation's interest. And so, I am glad to see that there appears to be strong bipartisan support for this right now.

And I think that although I share the fear of that over time, some Republicans may find it opportunistically advantageous to shift positions, I think there is enough of an understanding among the Republican party of the importance of this war for America that that will not happen. There will be, I suspect, plenty of other issues for Republicans to run on against this Congress and against this President, and will not need to make this an issue.

I would like to try to get down to a few of the issues and offer you some specific  considerations of what is going on in Afghanistan, why we need to be there, what we need to do and try to focus a little more practically.

First of all, I think the mission is very clear as long as we understand it properly. The mission is to eliminate threats to American soil and American vital security interests emanating from South Asia. Al-Qaeda is part of that. But there are a number of other groups that operate in Pakistan as well that are also very significant threats to American interests if not directly to American soil.

The attacks in Mumbai has -- which has long enabled the Kashmiri separatists group, by the way, actually has regional if not global Jihadi ambitions. It certainly has a set of aims that if it were about to pursue them, would set afire a portion of the world with a one and-a-half billion people and a quite considerable number of nuclear weapons, including a critical American strategic partner in India, and of course, destroying Pakistan.

That the aims of that group would do that is completely unacceptable for American national interest for anyone's interest in the world for that to happen. And so, we have to be very concerned about their activities. And then there are a couple of other groups in Pakistan that I will talk about in questions if people want to discuss further, including the one that was accused of killing Benazir Bhutto, but have a much more limited aim of destroying Pakistan, a state of 170 million people with 100 nuclear weapons.

I would submit that American vital national interests are involved there, too. And I think that is -- not very many people would argue about that.

The point that we need to consider is these are enemies that we are going to have to deal with, and we have right now an opportunity in Afghanistan, in that we are touching the rear areas of all four of those enemies. None of those enemies have primary objectives in Afghanistan. None of them are particularly actively trying to  gain ground in Afghanistan. None of them are particularly pursuing the coherent policy in Afghanistan right now.

All of them do have operatives who are present in Afghanistan. But our presence in Afghanistan allows us to touch those group; allows us much greater visibility on their activities and on the threats that they pose than we would otherwise have; allows us to, shall we say, politely interact with them on occasion. And allows us to exercise influence within Afghanistan, and I'm not talking about predator strikes.

The fact that you have significant cross-border movement across the Durand Line works two ways: It makes our life in Afghanistan hard, but it is also an opportunity for us, if we can get Afghanistan moving in the right direction, to influence what is going on in the areas of Pakistan that we most care about, particularly the Pubtab (phonetic) in the North-West Frontier Province but also Balochistan.

I have made the same point in regard to Iraq. And I think that it is important there, too, the fact that you have a million Iranian pilgrims coming annually to the shrines in Iraq has a profound effect on Iraq. And we need to stop being so focused on the effect that Pakistan and Iran have on Afghanistan, respectively, and think about the effect that Iraq and Afghanistan can have positively on their neighbors.

And considering the very, very limited leverage that we otherwise have in Pakistan, I think it is very important that we retain and build on this particular means of trying to drive the conflict within this country in the right direction.

I would also add this is a very simplistic point, but it is amazing to me how often it is lost, we have a two front war, in that we are fighting enemies in Afghanistan, we are working with the Pakistanis to fight in some cases the same, in some cases slightly different, but related enemies in Pakistan. It is inconceivable  that you could succeed in Pakistan without also succeeding in Afghanistan.

And we can stabilize Afghanistan, I think, without getting everything we want out of Pakistan, but we will not be able to end the fighting in Afghanistan as long as the situation in Pakistan is unsettled. The only way for this to work is for it to work on both sides of the border. And we have different parts to play.

In Afghanistan we have a much more direct role to play. In Pakistan we have a much more indirect role to play, but the United States has to play both roles simultaneously and play them well in order for this to work. And so, these are two halves -- one is not subordinate to the other -- but they are two halves of a regional strategy.

One of the positive things that we need to note about the situation in Afghanistan, after all of the media hurrah about it is headed off the cliff -- first of all, just to put that in perspective, the peak of this year's winter  violence was less than -- significantly less than a quarter of the peak of the violence that we saw in Iraq at the end of 2006.

One of the things that happened in terms of the media excitement about this is that Afghan violence is very, very cyclical. There is a fighting season, there is a winter lull. This winter was a relatively mild winter, so the lull came later and was less of a lull. But there is a lull. The media started paying close attention to this war as the fighting season got into high gear and saw a trend line that went up like this, and then extrapolated it to infinity.

In fact, what happened is the trend line went like this, and we are back down to a relatively lowering. It will go up again this summer. But we have to be very careful as we ride the sign wave of violence in Afghanistan not to allow any given, you know, three- or four-week period or three- or four-month period to sway us as we pay attention episodically, which is one of the problems that American have with these kind of  wars, to this war. We say, oh, my God, we have had four bad months in row, well, we are going to have four bad months in row. That is what fighting is like in Afghanistan.

The question is how do they compare to the equivalent four months in the previous year, what was actually happening, what was generated by this, and so forth. So we are going to have to peel that back.

But one of the good news stories about Afghanistan compared to Iraq is that there is no civil war in Afghanistan. And it is incredibly important point, in my view, that is often forgotten. There certainly are armed groups among the Tarjiks and Uzbeks and Hazaras, because everyone in Afghanistan is armed. There is no Afghan community that does not have an armed group. But they are not engaged in fighting against the Pashtuns. And the Pashtuns are not engaged in fighting against the Tajiks and the Hazaras and the Uzbeks.

What you have in Afghanistan is a  straightforward predominantly overwhelming Pashtun insurgency against a government at whose head sits a Pashtun and will probably continue to sit a Pashtun.

So you don't have the kind of interethnic or inter-sectarian violence that you had in Iraq. And that is incredibly important, because that was the thing that was driving Iraq rapidly off the cliff.

What terrorized all of us at the end of 2006 and galvanized the Administration into making that courageous decision was the fact that the populations in Afghanistan were actually mobilizing at a very local level to fight each other. And that is -- there is a short road from there to the abyss. I don't think there is a short road to the abyss in Afghanistan. We are not looking at that kind of dynamic.

And so, this is an insurgency. It is a nasty fight. It is a serious set of enemies. It is very complicated. But for a wide variety of reasons I would submit this is not harder than  Iraq; this is not harder than Vietnam. This is not the hardest thing in the world. We are making it look very hard for a variety of reasons. And I think there are inherent problems here. But this is something that is perfectly manageable if we can maintain the will to do it, and if we approach it properly.

What are the things that we have to do concretely? We can talk about the term parody for population, and that is from a counterinsurgency perspective, and that has to be the focus of our troops' efforts. But our overall effort has to be focused a little differently than that. And that is, we have to work to be establishing the legitimacy of the Afghanistan government. That is how you end an insurgency. Okay.

And you don't usually have to make that point, but that is sort of an obvious point to a counterinsurgent. But unfortunately, in part because of the way -- in part because of the fact that the current structures that we have in Afghanistan were not built to deal with  insurgency. They were built to deal with a post-conflict situation where we thought that the insurgency was over. And we have not yet fully gotten over that mindset in the way structure is functioned. We have too much development going on in the way that development traditionally goes on in war, which is not focused on building the legitimacy of local governments.

And in particular, one of the things that we are not doing in Afghanistan is pouring a lot of money into the Afghan government so the Afghan government can spend it. Instead, we are doing a lot of aid projects directly, having spoken with locals and figured out ideally what they want, but then do we do the project; we contract the project.

This is a problem, because that doesn't give the government legitimacy. And in many cases, by the way, the Taliban takes credit for the projects. Either they will literally put a sign saying, brought to you by the Taliban, or more frequently what they will do is say, the  Taliban has decided, the Taliban council has decided that we will permit this project to go forward, and we will not destroy it; you know, congratulations to the Afghan people. And then they take credit for it in that way. But the government gets nothing out of it.

Now, one of the reasons for this, of course, is because of the extremely limited capacity in the Afghan government to spend money, and there is a real fear that the government which has been pervasively corrupted by narco money will misappropriate funds. I can guarantee you that it will misappropriate funds. I can guarantee you that it will not spend money effectively. I think we seen this movie before. It was called Iraq.

But it was incredibly important that we accepted the downside risks that some of our money would be misappropriated and some of it would not be spent, and lots of it would not be spent properly in order to accept the incredibly important upside benefit of working to legitimise the Iraqi government, which is, amazingly enough,  actually worked.

We are not moving down that path in Afghanistan. We are still intolerant of Afghan institutions that are not fully compliant with international standards of transparency. And if we continue down that road, we will never have a capable Afghanistan government that can be seen as legitimate in the eyes of its people. And this is very hard for us to tolerate, particularly in an economic downturn to say we are going to have corruption, our money is going to be misappropriated.

But this goes back to the question -- I think John Nagl put this very well -- do we ever want to be able to leave Afghanistan? If we do, then there are certain prices that we have to pay. And unfortunately, inefficient and some corrupt use of moneys that are donated from the international community is one of them.

I echo the sentiments of everyone who regrets the fact that the President didn't commit to increasing the size of the Afghan national  security forces. This is a no-brainer. Once you get in on the ground it is -- even if you get on the ground it is apparent, as John pointed out, even if you just do the math, this is something that has to happen. It has to happen much more quickly. And again, it is going to require accepting the downside risk that we are going to produce a force that is of less quality, it is less well-trained, it is less well read -- less well led -- it is also less well-read --

(Laughter.)

DR. KAGAN: You know illiteracy is a significant problem in Afghanistan. But, you know, the funny thing is you will hear trainers in Afghanistan talk about how there are not enough trainable Afghans because of the illiteracy rate. Go back and look at most armies in history. It has been the norm until very recently that most soldiers were illiterate. And under the norm in most cases, most officers were illiterate, too.

We can work with that. Afghans are good fighters. They can get organized. We have to  accept risks there. Otherwise, you end up accepting risks only in the area of your soldiers -- our soldiers. And that is the problem. Right now, that is the area where we are accepting risks. We don't want to accept risks in our money and we don't want to accept risks with the kinds of Afghan troops that we are building.

I want to talk for a minute about Pakistan, which I agree is incredibly important, and I just want to put a flip on the way this discussion is usually had in Washington. I don't think it is the case that what we need to do above all is reassure Pakistan that we are going to take care of Afghanistan and stay there so that they don't need the Taliban and they don't need to support the Hakkani network, because I don't think that that is the only reason they are supporting those groups.

First of all, there is no such thing as Pakistan from the standpoint of Afghanistan policy. Just as there is no such thing as Iran from standpoint of drug trade in Afghanistan.  There are elements in Iran that benefit from the narco trade. There elements that are legitimately and seriously trying to defeat the narco.

There are elements in Pakistan that understand, including, I believe, President Zardari, that understand the importance of helping to stabilize Afghanistan restricting commitment. There are elements, particularly in the ISI, that believe the opposite.

But those guys are not just worried about a vacuum. Those guys are worried about India. And the people who are most hard over in Pakistan on supporting the Taliban and supporting the Hakkani network see us as a Trojan Horse that is injecting Indian influence into Afghanistan. They are just as concerned about the fact that Indian firms are building roads in Pakistan as they are about the possibility of Indian troops coming into Afghanistan.

For those guys it is not enough to tell them that this going to be okay, you don't need to worry, because they are going to worry. What we  have to tell them is your proxies are going to lose, and if you commit yourself -- if the ISI commits itself to having influence in Afghanistan via the Taliban and via the Hakkani network, it is not going to have influence in Afghanistan at all.

And so, we have to do both things. We have to commit to fixing the problem, but we also have to commit unequivocably to defeating the proxies. And then you can go to the ISI and say, if you want to influence in Afghanistan, you have to play with us, and you have to play with the government of Afghanistan. If you do that, you will be able to shake things in a direction that pleases you.

I think the matter of time and the question of the Washington flock versus the Afghanistan flock is very important. The funny thing about this is it is sort of more like a soccer than anything else. You never know quite how long a soccer game is going to go. And you can sort tell when you are getting to the end of a soccer half, but then there is always some amount  of injury time, which is only the referees know exactly how long that is. So you can think that you have a bunch of time and then the whistle blows or you can think that your clock is out, and then it turns out that you have another 10 minutes to play.

We need to focus on this, but we need to understand that as a soccer player can sometimes help put more time on the clock, as it were in a different way -- I think not by lying on the ground and moaning -- we have to work putting more time on the Washington clock. And that means helping people understand how important this is, helping people understand that it is doable and setting a reasonable set of expectations about what progress is going to look like.

And here I will tell you 2009 is virtually certain to be more violent than 2008; 2010 may be even more violent. We are not going to conduct, in all likelihood, decisive operations in Afghanistan in 2009. The conditions are not set for that.

If we are fortunate and if we get our stuff together, we can set conditions in 2009 to conduct decisive operations in 2010 and 2011. But that is the kind of time frame that we are talking about. And again, if we just watch the Iran metric, we are going to have a real problem.

And the last point that I want to make that has not been mentioned but is very important. We talked about building up the Afghan national security forces. We have not mentioned building up the American military.

But, look, if we pursue responsible strategies, as the President of the United States has already outlined both in Iraq and Afghanistan, if you put those two strategies together, you see a steady state requirement for the deployment of American ground forces for the next two to three years, because you get into who you are in a one thorn tradeoff right now with troops coming out of Iraq going into Afghanistan. I think if we actually resource this fight properly, that is going to continue to be true well into next year.

We have been talking now for eight years about how overstrained our ground forces are. And we excused ourselves from dealing with that on a wide variety of bases, including what is important that we should not have done in the first place, and we should just get out, and so forth.

President Obama has laid out the strategy in Iraq and a strategy in Afghanistan, both of which have significant bipartisan support and are the right thing to do. They have force requirements. When you add them up, they exceed the capabilities of the current United States military.

And in that context the one very distressing note in the national security debate on the Hill is that the question apparently is, how much are we going to cut the defense budget, rather than how are we actually going to undo one of the major mistakes that President Bush made in failing to mobilize adequately for the missions that he had given the armed forces? Thank you.

MR. SENOR: Thank you, Fred. Before we  open it up, I just want to ask one question that relates specifically to the events of this week.

General Barno, as you know, even what is happening today at The Hague or has already happened and what will be happening at the NATO summit later this week, there will be much discussion about the contributions from our allies to Afghanistan. You know, civilian resources, troops, equipment, funding, and as John Nagl said earlier this morning, the optics of 41 nations involved in Afghanistan is extremely important on the ground, and it is extremely important globally.

And on the other hand, he talked to folks on our side who are serving over there, and they continually speak to the dysfunctionality, some of what Ashley talked about, the problems with the, you know, chain of command and the unity of command and unity of decision-making both within the military but also between the military and the civilian side.

NATO still does not include the word  "war" in its plans in describing the mission in Afghanistan. While a number of our allies have performed well over there, even the Brits and the Canadians still have to check with their capitals before conducting any major operation that we initiate or we are calling for.

So, on the one hand we want their participation, their contribution and all of this equipment and resources and people; on the other hand, we have to sort of strike a balance between that and the risk of incoherence and dysfunctionality. And how would you describe that balance? And we talked a lot about the need to bring everybody together under one command. It has not truly happened operationally, and what would you advise the Administration in the days ahead to deliver on that?

LIEUTENANT GENERAL BARNO: I think that is a key question on the military side. And arguably the NATO assumption of the overall military mission in Afghanistan that occurred several -- I guess about a year after I left, has  been very problematic in terms of its execution.

NATO, when I first arrived in Afghanistan in October '03, was about a 6,000, 7,000-soldier force in Kabul in the municipal areas devoted to essentially security of the capital. And over a period of time they began a push, that the U.S. obviously supported, to move into other parts of the country very slowly based on conditions out there.

NATO was originally enlisted to come to Afghanistan, broadly speaking, because it was moving to a security place that was very calm. And by the time I left there I can recall in the spring of 2005, we had actually -- one of our tactical headquarters had built a chart that said how do you know your enemy is defeated, and they had checked off half of the blocks on that chart by the spring of 2005.

We had a month in early '05 where, as I recall, there was no violent incidents related to the Taliban. The numbers were just flat. The election, essentially, took all the air out of the  balloon, which was part of our strategy in '04. And that, you know, a year and-a-half later was dramatically different.

So in part that many would argue that change occurred because as the U.S. announced it was transitioning in NATO and the U.S. also announced in late '05 we were withdrawing 2,500 combat troops, we sent the message that we were on the way out of Afghanistan. And that changed the calculus.

Fast forward it to today, we now have this essentially NATO structure that was originally brought in to do more of a peacekeeping mission involved eyeball deep in a very tough counterinsurgency war, especially in the southern half of the country. The northern half of the country is still, in effect, a peacekeeping area. There is very little in the way of violent incidents right there now.

So the structure in the north is probably about right, in my judgment. In the south, though, I think as we can bring in  17,000-plus American troops and 4,000 trainers and potentially as many of the speakers have noted that is a down payment on a future force. But we need to amp up and change the headquarters arrangement to accommodate the fact that we are now going to have instead of two or three or four brigades on the ground, we may have six or seven or more brigades there.

That eventually gets us to instead of having a one four-star headquarters in Kabul with just the regional commands, I think that we have to look at whether -- as the U.S. reasserts leadership now in this nation, that we need to bring in some American division headquarters beyond the one that is here today. And perhaps even an American corps of headquarters of three-star headquarters to help focus on this counterinsurgency fight in the southern part of the country.

Now, that has been in the debate mix for a while. I'm not sure we are going to be moving in that direction anytime soon. But I think that  would be a very useful addition.

MR. SENOR: Fred, go ahead.

DR. KAGAN: I would like to second that and say that it is not only a useful but an essential addition. I don't think we are going to be able to develop and execute a proper campaign strategy without adding a three-star headquarters to this fight as quickly as possible.

And I would like to make a point -- two quick points about alliance. First of all, when we put NATO -- when we NATO-ized the Afghan mission, the primary beneficiary of that was meant to be NATO. We need to remember that that was back in the day when we were looking for ways of justifying the alliance's continued existence and trying to get it to do this kind of area thing, part of that.

The assumption, as General Barno said, is that the war was over, basically, and we were in post-conflict, peacekeeping state where we could afford to do that. Some of us -- I suspect General Barno were uncomfortable about that  decision from the outset, but we did it.

Now this isn't about NATO anymore. And it is not about NATO for two reasons:

First of all, it is not about NATO because we actually in war, and war matters. And so, preserving the processes of the alliance is much less important than helping the alliance win, because if you are interested in NATO, what matters at the end of the day in Afghanistan is whether we did not lose, not whether all of the NATO alliance processes have worked out to everyone's satisfaction. And that is what happened when you are in the war as opposed to a post-conflict environment.

And also the center of gravity of NATO has shifted to Europe, for anyone who has been following the Georgia/Russia conflict. And I think the future of the alliance is no longer going to be determined in Afghanistan, frankly, unless, perhaps, if we lose.

But I want to make one last point. And so I would say we have to stop imagining that the  purpose of the alliance in Afghanistan is the alliance. The purpose of the alliance in Afghanistan is supporting the military effort, and it has to be focused on that.

I have been cudgeling my brain to think of another example of an actual alliance-based counterinsurgency in history. And the only one I can really think of is the Boxer Rebellion. There is probably another one or two out there, but it is really hard. Alliance warfare is always hard. Alliance counterinsurgency is not only hard but extremely rare.

What usually happens when you have multiple states involved in a kind of insurgency is that one of them is the dominant state and the others follow the lead, which is not always the case of coalition warfare, was not the case of the Boxer Rebellion. I don't think this is the Boxer Rebellion.

So, I think that there is a real question here about how we are going to make this work in an alliance context, given that there is  very little historical predicate or precedent for even thinking about how to do this.

MR. SENOR: Now, one more question before I open it up. Jackson earlier today talked about the concerns abroad about the true bipartisan commitment to what we are doing in Afghanistan.

And while there are concerns -- and certainly the folks up here have talked about outside of this conference is the concern -- that what you are seeing right now are some people on the right side of the political spectrum and Republican and conservative circles basically saying it is time to get out of the nation building business. This is Obama's war, he campaigned in the summer and fall on Afghanistan, the importance of making Afghanistan the center piece of our global war on terror or OCO or whatever we call it now; and that we made good on our war, we turned Iraq around, let Obama on Afghanistan. Of course, there are some on the left that are beginning to say, let's just get out  of the war business altogether.

And yet, as we have seen -- as Bob alluded to, as we have seen, you know, throughout recent history, once a President commits to a major military commitment, unlike in domestic policy it is very hard for the Congress to unwind. Now, certainly Republicans -- once President Clinton committed to the Balkans, it was very hard for congressional Republicans, despite their opposition, to unwind it. As we saw with some of the debates over Iraq over the last couple of years, once the President committed it, is very hard for his critics to unwind it on Capitol Hill.

At the end of the day, President Obama has committed to Afghanistan in a major way. And despite there being growing opposition to it, don't you think -- just the logistical and resource commitments involved -- you just can't unwind that kind of commitment quickly.

DR. KAGAN: Well, I think you can't. And I think in particular I think one of the biggest problems is that there does appear to be a powerful lobby within the Democrats on Congress against this policy. But I think they are going to discover something very quickly, if they haven't already; namely, that a Democratic Congress cannot run against a Democratic president. And it cannot play the same kind of games that they played against Bush.

So, I think the danger is actually more subtle and more complicated. And I think we are starting to play out. I think there is pressure from certain congressional leaders on a Democratic caucus to press the Administration to change its goals. And I think that the danger is that whereas President Bush was well-known for being extremely stubborn and unswayable once he had committed to a policy --

MR. SENOR: Principle.

DR. KAGAN: Yes.

(Laughter.)

DR. KAGAN: I was trying to look for a neutral -- on the other side.

MR. SENOR: Yes.

DR. KAGAN: -- it is less clear that President Obama will have that same degree of determination. Perhaps he will. He is just an unknown quantity in that regard.

And so, my concern is not that Congress is going to try to turn off this war. Nancy Pelosi cannot vote against President Obama's supplements. But that, rather, that they will put pressure -- try to convince the President that he is losing support, and therefore, that the war is unsustainable, and therefore, try to sway him and work with those within the Administration who disagree with this policy to undermine it from within.

And in that sense, vociferous Republican opposition will help them make that case to weaken the policy, which is why I think it is very important that we maintain a very strong bipartisan support for this effort, so we can just take that issue off the table.

MR. SENOR: Let's open it up for questions.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Hi, just a quick question about the direct trade. From some of the articles that I read here, it sounds like the direct trade is this great undermining effort that is really going to destroy all of our efforts in Afghanistan.

First of all, is that assumption correct?

Secondly, I would just like a little clarification of exactly who this poppy money goes to. I understand that some in Iran and some in the Afghanistan government benefit. It doesn't make it to Mullah Muhammed Omar, the Hakkani network, who exactly is getting those funds?

And finally, how do we reconcile the problem that this money is directly funding our enemies, but at the same time if we destroy this crop we alienate the population? So how do we reconcile that? What is Obama's policy and what is your suggestion?

DR. KAGAN: I'm glad you brought that up. It is a very important question. I wish that  we had the answer to where does all of the drug money go. But unfortunately, it is a cash and carry kind of business, so it is sort of hard to track receipts and figure that kind of thing out.

In general terms, the sort of accepted statistics are that it is about a $4 billion a year business in Afghanistan. Estimates range from 100 million to $500 million of that goes to the Taliban, goes to the enemy, but principally I think to Mullah Omar's group and to the Hakkani network. I tend to think that it is probably at the higher end of that range, closer to 500 million.

It is hard to know what they get from other sources. They certainly get significant funding from the Saudi -- from certain Saudi individuals -- not the Saudi government, but certain Saudi individuals. They certainly get support from Pakistan and from other groups. Could they survive without any of the drug money? Probably not.

But the question is how much of that  drug money could you take away in what kind of time period? And when I was there I got an interesting briefing from the guys who do the poppy eradication. And it became clear that you can take maybe 20 to $30 million off of the street in terms of poppy production in a year. Okay.

Well, the problem is that they don't know -- when the poppy eradication guys go out, they don't know whether the field that they are cutting down belongs to somebody who is going to give the money to Mullah Omar or it belongs to somebody who is going to give the money to some of the Afghanistan government.

And so, if they were actually attacking specifically the $100 million a year, you might imagine that over time they might make some progress. But what they are actually attacking is the $4 billion year at $20 million a year in eradication.

In that sense eradication is irrelevant to the counterinsurgency mission, simply because you are not going to be able to take enough money  out of the pockets of the enemy in any period of time that matters. And so, we should not imagine that that is part of the coined effort. It is part of the long-term effort to build a stable Afghanistan, of course.

And, you know, we should not give up on carrying narcotics, but we should separate it from the notion that it is part of the counterinsurgency fight, except in one respect. One of the most important things that is delegitimizing the current Afghan government in the eyes of its people is that belief that has considerable justification that the government is pervasively corrupt with drug money.

A large portion of that $4 billion goes to people in the Afghan government. Portions of it also goes to the Iranian Kurds force, portions of it go to elsewhere. But a large portion goes to the Afghanistan government.

I would submit to you that we would make much more of a dent in helping establish the legitimacy of the Afghan government by persuading  the Afghan government to prosecute even a small number of senior Afghan leaders who have their hands all over this drug money. And it doesn't have to be Karzai's brother --

(Laughter.)

DR. KAGAN: -- we can start with other people, but get them to do that. And I think that one or two even high-profile prosecutions and convictions would be worth more that $20 million worth of poppy eradication.

How can we do this? Well, one of the things that we can do is recognize that in contrast to the kinds of criminality we saw in Iraq, drug trafficking is an international crime. And we can build evidence packets against Afghan narco traffickers, including people in the government. And we can threaten the Afghanistan government. We can bring those people up on charges ourselves. We can bring it up in front of Interpol.

Now, none of that is a good solution, because what you want is the Afghans to prosecute  their own people. But we have leverage here that we not using. And that is partly because we are so focused on killing poppies that we are not focused on what the actual problem is undermining our effort in the most fundamental sense. It is not the enemy. It is what it is doing to the Afghanistan government.

MR. SENOR: Yes, sir. We need a mic right over there. Thanks.

MR. DUSS: Mat Duss, Center for American Progress. In regard to Dr. Kagan's point about maintaining bipartisan foreign consensus, there seems to be something of an agreement on the two panels today that however President Obama's plan is being spun, it is, in fact, a long-term, large-scale commitment to nation building in Afghanistan.

Now, understanding that one of the reasons that the American public kind of soured on the Iraq effort was that there was the perception that President Bush was not being completely candid and forthright in describing the situation  on the ground there for a number of years.

How will it be possible for President Obama to maintain public support for the effort in Afghanistan without being completely candid about what he is trying to do there?

DR. TELLIS: I think there are two ways to deal with that. One is the approach that seems to be embodied in the current policy, which is to convert the entire effort to the struggle to defeat al-Qaeda and its constituents and hope that that carries you through the process. Why do you conduct nation building as a accept.

The other is to come out at some point and be candid that this is ultimately a state of nation building effort, and that we have to be committed both in terms of resourcing it as well as staying the course over the long term. I'm not sure in my own mind about which of the two is better today.

I think because of the issues that Dan raised about getting the Europeans on board, particularly in the next few months, the idea of  focusing on al-Qaeda may be a better tactic. But I think I agree with you that over the long term there is no way you cannot sustain a policy like this based on a lie or based simply on the expectation that people will buy into the anti al-Qaeda justification for sustaining such a long-term effort.

So, I hope that as the process evolves, the President will find opportunities to tell people clearly what this is about.

Now, you have to remember part of the partisan politics that is involved here. Admitting that this is ultimately a state of nation building policy implicitly involves admitting that there is a residual Bush legacy that was actually correct. And I can understand that this may not be palatable to announce, certainly in the immediate aftermath of an election. But if that is what the truth requires, then at some point we have to face up to it.

DR. KAGAN: Let me come briefly to the President's defense. Obama has not been dishonest  with the American people. He has been less than forthcoming about what the full cost and commitment. But I think we have to take the political environment into account.

I don't think any American imagines that we are going to wrap this up in a short period of time. And President Obama gave no indication that he thought that we were going to wrap this up in a short period of time. And so, I don't think there is an implicit promise out there in the President's current stated strategy that this is going to be a short-term thing and that it is not going to require a significant commitment, that it is going to be easy, and so forth and so on.

I think that I would have preferred to see a more straightforward exposition of, you know, how significant a commitment it is going to be, how we have to be committed over the long term, and so forth. But I don't think that we are right now in a position where the President has implicitly promised one thing and is going to deliver something else. I think it is simply a  question that he has not emphasized as much as some of us might like the magnitude and length of this effort.

So I think the risk of people waking up a year from now and saying, hey, I thought that you said this was going to be done by now and what is going on with this is very low. But I think at some point, Ashley is right, he is going to have to convert this into an argument for, no, this is really, you know, a defining struggle of our time and it is something that is going require our effort over a long period. But I agree I don't think it is was vital for him to do that just at this moment.

MR. SENOR: Yes, sir. Go ahead.

MR. WELL: Hi, I'm Christian Well with Military, dot, com.

Fred, I would like to see if you can burrow into the details a little bit on the commitment -- the military commitment that is needed in Afghanistan. You helped craft a pretty detailed plan for the surge in Iraq.

I would also like to get the perspective of Lieutenant General Barno here. What specifically would you do with the increase in U.S. forces besides the training? You know the terrain in Afghanistan is a lot different, it is harder to secure, it is harder to resupply, it is harder to provide fire support, it is harder to do air strikes. It presents a tactical challenge that Iraq did not.

Can you give us some suggestions on how we could craft a strategy that would work there?

DR. KAGAN: I -- burrow into the details, Christian. Thank you. That is what I really would like to do.

Iraq presented some challenges that Afghanistan doesn't either. The Iraqi insurgent tension for fighting within populations made the task of routing them out a lot harder. Afghan insurgents don't tend to do that on the whole. They tend to prefer to fight outside of hibernation centers, which makes targeting them easier in some respects. So, there are some  tradeoffs there, although in general terms I think you are right.

But we will be up to seven American combat brigades deployed in Afghanistan by the end of this year with all of the things that the President has committed. We were at 22 in Iraq at the height of the surge.

My own estimate is that we are insufficiently focused on some of the gaps in our deployment pattern, particularly in RC West. I think that the provinces of Farah, Herat, Badghis and Ghor are likely to become increasing flash points as we succeed in RC South and we drive some of the leadership at poppy cultivation, a variety of things into those provinces, which right now are very close to being devoid of any coalition forces and even Afghan forces, which is even more distressing.

There are virtually no effective Afghan national army troops at RC West right now. And in (inaudible) I don't think we even have PRTs, frankly. So that is sort of a black hole.

I look at that and I think there is probably a requirement for two or three additional American combat brigades -- well, I would love for them not to be American, but I think they will have to be American, and there is also the question of maintaining a theater reserve, which is something that we have never had in Afghanistan. We had it sporadically in Iraq, and it turns out to be very important.

So I think that you are looking at a requirement, a real requirement of 10, possibly 11 American brigades in a surge -- I will call it that -- that will probably need to last 18 to 24 months, assuming -- and this is the key thing -- that we actually accelerate the development of the Afghan national army. If we don't accelerate the development of the Afghan national army, we will have to be there in a much greater strength for the long term, because right now we are programmed to get 134,000 in the ANA by the end of 2011. And that was already an acceleration. Originally it was supposed to happen by 2013.

One hundred and thirty-four thousand is totally inadequate in that country. I think 250,000 would be a minimum for the Afghan national army, and we have to work on the Afghan police, border police. If we accelerate that, which is not a part of the current plan, unfortunately, then I would imagine a requirement for 10 or 11 American brigades for that period and then start to ramp down.

What do they do? Well, they are going to have to secure the population, and that means they are going to have to do non-traditional counterinsurgency missions of identifying enemy sanctuary and support zones within Afghanistan, going to clear them out. Our guys go after this in some areas and other areas they are not. The terrain and so forth makes it more complicated to do, Afghan culture makes it more complicated to do.

You don't just drive into a Afghan village and set up a checkpoint the way we would do in Iraq. If you do that, you are likely to  generate more violence rather than improving the situation. So, cultural sensitivity is important. You will have to work on that.

And we are going to have to find a way to get the non-military components of this coordinated with the military effort or even with each other, which right now is not happening. They are not coordinated with each other, and they are certainly not coordinated with the military effort.

But in order for that to happen, you have to have a coherent and comprehensive military campaign plan into which these things can fit or a joint campaign plan between built jointly between the embassy -- well, in Iraq it would be the embassy, you don't even have the equivalent of that in Afghanistan -- built between the non-kinetic components of the military.

None of that is happened. And I would submit that with the current state of the headquarters both on the military side and on the civilian side over there, there is not the  capacity to do that kind of planning right now. That is one of the reasons why I think that actually fixing the headquarters problem, including getting a three-star headquarters over there, but also, you know, supporting the McKiernan's efforts to building up the U.S. forces Afghanistan staff -- but somebody has got to figure out how to do that on the civilian side.

I hope that that is what Holbrooke is taking on, but it is big task, and he doesn't have any international mandate to do that.

And then you have to do planning. And that is one of the reasons it is going to take a long time, because right now we are deploying forces into theatre. Those guys will get on the ground and do good things. They are not going to be counterproductive. But neither are they going to be used optimally or anything like optimally, because we simply don't have the planning structures in place to figure out how to do that.

So, if I were -- you know, the thing that distresses me most about the strategy other  than the ANA, is that there is a lack of urgency about fixing the command of control arrangements on both the civil and the military sides so that we can do the planning we need to do.

LIEUTENANT GENERAL BARNO: Quick comment. When the military does their analysis on what they require in the way of forces, they do what is call troops to task. They identify what are the tasks you are trying accomplish, then they back off of that to say here is what kind of unit, here is how many I need to do that.

In Afghanistan there is a myriad of tasks out there. And again, these plans may exist. They have not been made public at this point, but there is some fundamental questions: What is our strategy for dealing with population security in the rural areas? The vast majority of the country is rural. The majority of the population lives outside of cities. What is our plan for how we are going to approach that? And then what does that imply in a way of troops?

How are we going to use special  operations forces? Are we going to use them primarily in strike missions? Are they going to train Afghan national army units, commando units? Are they going to organize local protection forces in various parts of the country? Are they going to have a role on the border, in the interior? How are we thinking about that? What is the type of forces we will need for lines of communications security, how to make sure we can use the roads and the Afghan population can use the road, which is their lifeline as well? And how do we protect that? What kind of forces are going to be needed for that?

What are we going to do along the borders? Are we going to provide any military capability there? That is a 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, the distance from Washington, D.C., to Denver, Colorado, much of it looking like the Rocky Mountains. That is a daunting task, but are there some focused areas that there may be some military requirements?

So, all of that goes into this calculus  of what do you need in the way of troops and what kind of approach you have. Each of those things I have described has several options associated with it. And so, you have to rationalize all of those and come up with a comprehensive -- as Fred knows -- a joint campaign plan. And that is just the military, the joint the campaign plan, the civil military aspect.

The one principle I think that is essential that hopefully we will see laid out on the ground that we started when I was there, and we do it in parts of the country but not other parts is what I call area ownership, which is military units own, from the standpoint of responsibility, pieces of territory, whether they be provinces or districts or multiple districts. And within that, the military commander -- and this is primarily in the east today -- has overall cognizance of all the effort that is going on.

He doesn't command civilians, but the civilians work in support of his unified civil military vision of that area. It is a  collaborative effort. But the military guy, effectively, is held accountable for that territory. And he is partnered with an Afghan governmental official and usually an Afghan military official as well. Again, we have examples of this in the east. This is not how we operate in the south right now.

I think that idea of area ownership of having one person in charge or at most, two people in charge, military and civilian, and having accountability for the results in a defined area that they are going to work for their tour is a very important principle. And I hope it becomes part of the operational plan on the ground.

MR. SENOR: We have time for one more question. Go ahead.

MR. PETROUS: Hi, my name is Jerry Petrous from Georgetown University. We talked a lot about the differences between Iraq's and Afghanistan's conflicts. I think one of the important parts of Iraq was the Sunni tribal awakening.

My question to the panel is, how does that sort of local engagement fit into our strategy in Afghanistan and whether that is competing with building the legitimacy of the Afghan central government?

DR. KAGAN: It depends on whether you do it right or do it wrong. It is not going to look anything like the Anbar Awakening. Afghanistan is very different in this regard and the tribal dynamics are very different.

I think the tribes are not going to be very helpful in this regard. I think that whereas in Iraq you could go to tribes, I think in Afghanistan I think you have to work at the village level, you have to work at the community level.

There is a program in place right now, the Afghanistan provincial protection program or something like that the PPO stands for, which is trying to do something like this. But I think it is a flawed concept, because it is focused at the district level. And as soon as you get to the  district level, you have tribal politics, which makes this stuff break down, and it also is very heavily depending on central government involvement.

But I think what we are going to have to do is address the fact that 30 years of war have destroyed social structure in local Afghan villages. So community elders are not in charge. Some of the locals have been driven off or -- and people don't have a sense of trust in their neighbors that Afghans traditionally have to protect them against outside threats.

How do you deal with that? Our guys go out, we as Afghan national security forces counterparts and we help reassure the population, find out what the actual threat is, help them address it, and get to the grievance that -- the number one grievance a year ago in Afghanistan was is sense of insecurity, which is pervasive even where the security is actually pretty good. And I think that that goes back -- goes to this social breakdown.

So it is going to be a very different phenomenon, and I think it is not going to be the sort of thing which sort of expands across Afghanistan freely the way the Anbar Awakening sort of did in Iraq. It was a little more complicated than that. But I do think that the basic concept is that we have to build bottom up as well as building top down. But in this case, bottom up is helping villagers understand that the organs of security that the Afghans central government has to provide to them working with us can give them the thing that they want most, and that, in turn, feed back to the notion of legitimacy.

So I think it can be made to work properly.

MR. SENOR: Okay. Thank you, everybody, and thanks to General Barno, Fred Kagan and Ashley Tellis.

The game plan we will take a short coffee break right now. At 10:45 we will began our panel with Representatives Harman and McHugh.

Third Panel

MR. KRISTOL: I was on the trip to Munich for the National Security Conference with Jane Harman, and we were planning this conference. And I asked if she would come. She was kind of enough to say if she could work it out with her schedule, she would.

And I said what Republican member would you recommend for a thoughtful and serious discussion, and she said John McHugh.

And then I saw Mr. McHugh about two or three weeks ago to talk about the defense budget, and I said if I finalize this, and I said what Democratic member would you recommend, and he said Jane Harman.

But, actually, the truth is these are two of the most thoughtful members of Congress on national security matters. Jane Harman was ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, now Chairman of the Intelligence Subcommittee of Homeland Security. Mr. McHugh is  ranking member on House Armed Services.

Both, I think, came to the House in the same year, 1993; is that right?

CONGRESSWOMAN HARMAN: And served on Armed Services together.

MR. KRISTOL: And served on Armed Services together.

CONGRESSMAN MC HUGH: She was much younger, though.

(Laughter.)

MR. KRISTOL: I will stay out of that.

Thank you. It is an awfully busy time, obviously, this week in Washington and on the Hill, so thank you both for coming.

Congresswoman Harman will speak for ten minutes or so from the podium, and then Mr. McHugh. And then we will have a discussion about the points that they raise.

Ms. Harman.

(Applause.)

CONGRESSWOMAN HARMAN: I want to thank Bill and congratulate Dan -- I don't know where  Dan is, father-to-be for the second time in another week -- on founding a new organization. What Washington needs is another think tank. But what Washington does need is thoughtful people coming together to think about the issues. And many people in this new organization are people I have known for many years and interact with regularly.

Bill did not tell you the whole story of the Munich delegation this year. Here is the deal. John will find this amusing. At the last minute the seven Senators who were part of the ten-member delegation, three members from the House and seven from the Senate, had to cancel because there was an all-weekend, enlightening conversation about -- I think it was the stimulus package. So they couldn't come.

That left the House delegation in charge. That is a good start. The House delegation was Harman, Tauscher and Sanchez, all female, all Californians. So I announced, as the senior member, that we were going to have a  slumber party on the plane. Bill was extremely uncooperative. He is clueless about what women do.

(Laughter.)

CONGRESSWOMAN HARMAN: On the other hand, this is a good start.

John McHugh gets it. We were elected together. We served together on Armed Services for years. We served together on Intelligence for years. And he is a thoughtful, enlightened -- I didn't remember -- that is a cute story that we suggested each other to do this, but why not. So, of course, we are going to agree, or, if we don't agree, John McHugh will learn in the next few weeks that I was right.

At any rate, I appreciate the invitation to be here. Many of you are my friends. I think it is just absolutely critical that we are thoughtful and deliberative about the tough challenges facing the United States. I have been panned a bit for agreeing to come down here in the blog world because the new neo-con organization --  what is Harman doing in the new neo-con organization?

My answer is I'm talking to some friends, and I am, you know, representing perhaps a different point of view. But when there is a tough job to do, I think a woman needs to do it.

So some are saying -- we are talking about Afghanistan, right? Some are saying that this breaks down to two points of view. One is the, quote, Republican view, which is that the Bush muscular approach in Iraq worked, and let's use it again in Afghanistan. And, oh, by the way, if that doesn't work, let's call the Afghanistan adventure Obama's war. This is the alleged Republican view.

The alleged Democratic view is that the British and the Soviets failed to win in Afghanistan; and therefore, should we continue to be there, it will become a Vietnam-like quagmire for the U.S., too. And that is a point of view that I have heard expressed by some people who are Democrats. But, not surprisingly, I disagree with  both views.

And I think that Obama's take on this is pretty close to my view, and I have read some comments by some of you -- I won't reveal your names -- that are pretty positive about the Obama approach, because it is both a potential kinetic approach, but it also has many other dimensions. And so let me just talk about it or talk about how I see it and why I think it is the way to go.

First of all, I would sort of put my views in three baskets about what we need to do about Afghanistan and the region. One, I think we do need to limit our objective to making certain there is no sanctuary in Afghanistan or Pakistan for our adversaries, but that limited objective has to be in a context. And that context has to be that we are helping both Afghanistan and Pakistan to develop good governance.

And why do I think that matters? I think only if there is adequate governance and civil capacity in these countries, which there is  not now in either of them, will there be the public buy-in necessary to achieve the objective of no sanctuary for our adversaries.

Second, I think that the U.S. strategy in this region must be population-focused -- this relates to my first point -- not enemy-focused. Basic law and order do not exist in most parts of Afghanistan, for example. So, obviously, as we all know, village-leadership warlords and Taliban-style justice have filled the gaps. That is not a good situation.

The current U.S. practice, or what has been U.S. practice, to support warlords, I think, has led to massive amounts or fed massive amounts of corruption in the country. And that is not good for any successful strategy. So I think we need to invest much more heavily in something that I believe Obama plans to do, and that is helping Afghan-style PRTs, much as we helped Iraqi-style PRTs, succeed by providing the right advisers and trainers, and so on and so forth, and very targeted expertise.


Finally, the last point, to paraphrase from Hillary Clinton, it takes a region not just a village, and an engaged international community to root out the Taliban and stabilize the area. I think Richard Holbrooke is right to call the area Af-Pak. That seems to have taken hold. But it is not just Af-Pak. It is also India and the entire region that is relevant.

And in case anyone missed it, there is a conference starting today at The Hague, and I think that conference is probably the right setting to roll out this more nuanced, I think, better U.S. policy, and it is a test of a lot of things. It is a test of NATO; it is a test of Obama's leadership; and it is a test of a lot of folks who are going to be there, including interestingly Iran. It will be interesting to see what they say.

There was an article in the paper, I think today, about Iran talking about the narco traffic in Afghanistan and why that matters to Iran. So let's just see what comes out of that.


And, by the way, I don't think our policy, new policy, is perfect. I thought there was a very good suggestion yesterday from Doug Fife. I don't know -- is Doug here? No. Why isn't Doug here to listen to me?

(Laughter.)

CONGRESSWOMAN HARMAN: (Continuing) -- who wrote in yesterday's "New York Times" that our efforts need to be accompanied by a communications strategy for the region. I think this is absolutely right. They have one. We don't. I see Ashley nodding. Hi, Ashley. How are you?

And, you know, it is kind of ironic that folks who would take us back to the seventh century are more advanced communicators then we are, but they are. And we lack a communication strategy at our peril.

So I think I have covered my basic points. I think that the choice of 4,000 trainers, U.S. trainers -- I gather NATO may -- may provide some more -- is about the right number. I think that surging in other ways,  economic and diplomatic help, is exactly right. And I think that the final goal of the strategy, which is ridding the Afghan economy, at least focusing on Afghanistan, from a reliance on drugs, a drug-based economy, is critical.

The drug-based economy of Afghanistan threatens the entire region, and that is a good reason why, again, I think Iran is at the table in The Hague today.

Richard Holbrooke's agricultural assistance initiative is the kind of program that can work. But if we are going to transition Afghanistan to growing other crops, we also have to guarantee that those crops can get to market. And guaranteeing safe transit across a series of countries, given who is blocking the roads, is a very hard task. And it is one that we and NATO and, hopefully, the Afghans are going to have to work at.

So what is our goal? Our goal is to eliminate the sanctuary and put both Af and Pak on a much more secure and stable footing. The brutal  attacks in Pak yesterday are a signal that this is getting -- could be getting harder, not getting easier.

And, by the way, another thing that I think is still an impediment to our getting Pakistan policy right is their refusal to let us question A. Q. Khan, who I continue to believe may be by their lights the father of their nuclear industry, but by my lights he is an international outlaw who had more to do with the nuclear sophistication of North Korea and Iran probably than any other person.

And I was never persuaded -- I don't know what John's view is -- based on briefings I got on the intelligence community, that we knew we had wrapped up his network. So I think questioning him and making certain we know what he knows is something we should absolutely insist on.

We have under-resourced Afghanistan for too long. I think Friday was signaling a course correction. We took our eye off the ball while we were bogged down in Iraq. I'm not arguing about  the surge, the late surge, but I think for a few years we did not have a plan that made any sense in Iraq. And all of our resources had to be devoted to that region, especially intelligence resources, which deprived us of really knowing about the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan.

So let me just finally say that I'm not sure how this ends or when this ends, but a key will be -- and this was part of what Obama announced -- the provision of metrics to measure our success. I had a conversation with Admiral Mullen this morning. I ran into him, and I said, so where are the metrics? And he said they exist. And so I said, well, what are they? And he said, well, we're not sure we are going to discuss those publicly.

Well, that may be a good strategy. I don't know. But I think that Congress is an independent branch of government. Let us remember that even though the last administration thought we were a nuisance -- and sometimes we are, and sometimes we are dysfunctional -- let us remember  that we are an independent branch of government. And I think something we could productively do is, both in open and closed sessions, make certain that there were good metrics to apply to Afghanistan, and that, whatever they are, those benchmarks are being achieved. And if they are not achieved, something happens.

We have to hold this administration accountable for its plan in Afghanistan. A lot of our treasure, both human and financial -- whatever is left of the second -- are going to have to be spent in Afghanistan. And I certainly want us to have a very careful, clear-eyed view of what the stakes are there. I personally think they are high. I would hope we would do well. I think the President is on the right track, and I'm here to help.

And I obviously know we are going to do Q and A. So please welcome the real act, John McHugh.

(Applause.)

CONGRESSMAN MC HUGH: That felt like a  setup, but I will roll with it. We always try to learn. I have been here about ten minutes on stage, and I have learned a few things.

One, that Jane Harman is very modest, because in every dealing I have ever had with either a member of Congress or the State Department when they have just come back from wherever it is you are talking about, they say, well, having just returned from the region.

She just returned from Afghanistan yesterday, and she never mentioned that. And how she could roll off a plane and look this great, as she always does, is amazing to me as well.

The thing that really didn't surprise me, as I was reading the press as I came over here this morning, it was all McCain to do a panel; McCain and Harman to talk about issues. You had to go to about page 14 to find that I was going to be here. It was kind of like I know, when I die in a plane crash, it will say "also killed."

(Laughter.)

CONGRESSMAN MC HUGH: But I truly am  honored. I truly am honored to be here, whatever page or paragraph I appear in.

And I in all seriousness want to say I could not share a stage with someone whom I more admire and I more appreciate the intellect of than Jane Harman. We are both fugitives now from the intelligence community.

And I don't know about you, Jane, but I feel much more intelligent for it. Maybe we can talk about that a bit later.

Thank you to FPI. Thank you to Bill, Dan, and others who have worked so hard to create this new body that, as Jane suggested, may not on a numerical value be absolutely necessary, but from an intellectual value, and I do believe is that.

Bill and Jane both were kind enough to talk about my intellect. So I want to start on that high level. Let me begin by quoting that font of great American wisdom, Homer Simpson, who once said, you know, I don't care what situation you are dealing with in life. You really only  need three phrases. The first is: Cover for me. The second is: Sounds good to me, boss. And the third is: It looked like that when I got here.

What is the point? The point is when then candidate Barack Obama was out on the campaign trail last fall, he spent a great deal of effort trying to recast Afghanistan as the good war, the just war, the war we had to win. I don't know this, but I suspect, particularly leading up to the release of the announcement of the new strategy last week, on one occasion he had to think let's throw up our hands and say it looked like that when we got here, and propose a strategy that was more narrowly focused, that was clearly, at least in the short term, less expensive in terms of blood and treasure, that probably was far less difficult in terms of his political base.

And I want to start off by saying he didn't do that. And I want to thank him, and I want to give him credit.

By saying we are going to take a whole-of-theater approach, by saying we recognize  that both Pakistan and Afghanistan are linked in sometimes subtle, sometimes very overt but very important ways, by recognizing that we have to build both our military and civilian capabilities and capacities in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, by recognizing that we have to re-engage our ISAF and NATO partners in more and hopefully productive ways, and on and on and on, I can only say to the President, it sounds good to me, boss.

But I have to tell you this is the start of the road, and Jane mentioned this in her comments. This is where it gets interesting. This is kind of like the part of the movie toward the end when the lights go off, the thunder and lightning strike, and you find out there is a really creepy creature in your midst.

In our House there is about potentially 435 very scary creatures. We are called Representatives, thank you. But I have to tell you, as Jane said, Congress matters. We are going to have a play in this process, and I don't care if you go back to Vietnam. I don't care if you  discuss the date that occurred in the '06 and '07 Iraq surge. Congress has a way of influencing and transporting its opinions into executive policy.

I suspect -- I didn't get a chance to talk to him directly, but I suspect that is why President Bush vetoed not one but two wartime supplemental bills: Recognition that, yes, money is important, but there were very significant inhibiters on how and in what ways we could use our troops in those kinds of circumstances.

So we have got to become very realistic with the fact that, look, I'm sure -- we did not -- I did not hear the first two panels, but I'm sure there was a great deal of informed analysis. I'm certain as well that as we go forward from this point, there will be a great deal of very serious discussion among serious scholars.

But, to be effective, foreign policy cannot stop at the think-tank door. It has to be carried through the halls of Congress and on to the President's desk. We saw it in Iraq, and I suspect in some way yet to be determined we are  going to see it in Afghanistan.

Now, I don't want to suggest to you that the political road that we saw in the development of the Iraq debate will be the same this year as it was at that time. It won't. But I do believe that the similarities, when properly applied, can instruct us in the differences, if we look at them wisely, and should inform us. And obviously, the most clear difference is the fact we now have an administration that is of the same party as the majority party of both houses in Congress.

What does that mean? Well, we are going to have a debate on this. But what it does mean is that it is going to evolve in different ways. Perhaps we can call it the choreography of that debate.

In '07, at least from my perspective, as I was looking forward -- and I use that word advisedly -- to the debate -- or excuse me, the elections in '08, the debate was very vigorous. It was protracted, and pretty much by Washington standards it was out there for everyone to see.  It was pretty visible.

It is going to change this year to the extent that it happens. It would seem to me -- and this is not a criticism -- one of the key objectives of the Obama administration has to be to try to do what it can to keep Afghanistan from becoming a political liability, from driving his party apart. To think anything differently, I think, would be unreasonable. It would be foolish, and, clearly, from a partisan perspective, that makes a great deal of sense.

What does that mean in terms of the debate? Well, I think it means rather than in '07 when the discussions occurred largely in the committee rooms and on the House floor, the debate this time is going to occur in the caucus rooms in the offices of the leadership.

And our responsibility, as a part of the minority, is to do what we can to bring clarity and transparency to that. We can't determine the outcome, but we can try to affect the process, and we are going to try to do that. We are going to  work to try to preserve those things we view as absolutely essentially and necessary.

And that means, frankly, by and large, what the President has already outlined: A robust, counterinsurgency policy that works both on paper and in the battlefield and, even more importantly, that has a successful component out in the streets and the villages where really hearts and minds determine who wins and who losses.

You know, General Petraeus noted in his comments before the Munich Security Conference that a truly effective counterinsurgency program and effort strives to, as he put it, secure and serve the population.

And then he went on to talk about what worked in Iraq and what we can apply in Afghanistan. That includes building the capacity and the capability of the Afghan national security forces, as well as perhaps more importantly giving local citizens a stake in the process, a hope for a better tomorrow; the recognition that unlike  those who are trying to defeat us and trying to upset our objectives, we are here for the long haul. We need to give our Pakistan and our Afghanistan or ISAF partners a new objective on which we can all agree, the belief that, as I said, we are committed to this cause.

That is not a half-in strategy. That is not an opportunity to say, well, we can narrow down these objectives. We can try to leave as we have in the past the sorry Afghan history of opportunities missed, of missions left unfulfilled, of challenges left unmet.

And I have to tell you that I think this may serve as our last true opportunity to get this right. If this were Texas- hold-em, we are not going to bluff our way to this pot. We have to be all in. And again to his credit, I think the President has given us the opportunity to do that.

On our side that means we are going to fight to do everything we can to maintain the policy as at least it was briefed to us last Friday. Now, I will tell you, it is going to be  reasonable to adjust our objectives, to make the changes that are necessary on the road forward, to make sure we are responding to the realities on the ground.

But I don't think that should provide an opportunity for those who previously espoused what has become kind of euphemistically known as a minimalist approach. And I worry that some of my colleagues in the House who just last fall were out on the campaign trail saying, yes, we can -- and that is not a partisan statement; both parties did it; yes we can -- are now with respect to Afghanistan saying, well, you know what? Maybe we can't, or maybe we shouldn't, or maybe we ought to pause and think about this for a while.

Iraq in the final analysis was built simply up by a comprehensive and coherent and fully resourced counterinsurgency strategy. We can't accept anything less in Afghanistan and the Pakistan view.

Just a couple of other viewpoints.

Benchmarks: I support benchmarks. I  was one of first members of the House to write a bill implementing benchmarks to assess our progress or lack thereof in Iraq. But what concerns me and what I expressed to Admiral Mullen yesterday and Secretary Gates just last week is that benchmarks cannot be utilized to try to effect a different outcome. We can't set the bar so high as to guarantee failure or so low as to fabricate success.

Troop strength: The president has made a start, but I would argue it is only a start. There seems to be some confusion as to the number of troops General McKiernan has asked for. I was there. I just returned from the region about five weeks ago.

(Laughter.)

CONGRESSMAN MC HUGH: General McKiernan was still speaking about the need for 30,000 or so troops. The President has made a good start towards that. I believe they ought to announce the remainder of those troops now. And I believe they ought to announce them not that that will get  them to the theatre necessarily any more quickly; but, rather, because to do it later risks sending the wrong message. It risks suggesting to those who wish us ill or failure that we are not succeeding, and more troops are necessary.

More importantly the announcement of the troops now suggests the earlier point I made: We are there to see this through. And from everything I know about the President, from everything I have heard, that is precisely what he wants to see happen. And for whatever it is worth, I would counsel him to do that.

The focus on the training of the security forces is certainly a positive step. But I suspect many in this room believe, as I do, we need to grow those troops further, and we need to grow them faster. For all of the good effect that the President's announcement of 4,000 additional trainers does, it really doesn't do anything to accelerate the time line, 134,000 for the Afghan National Army by the end of 2011.

We have to do it better. We have to do  it faster. And we probably are going to have to grow that National Army to 200,000, perhaps 250,000, with a similar increase to the Afghan National Police.

I would tell you that that expansion is absolutely necessary and has to be looked at in one way and one way only, a component of a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy. Growing the Afghan national security forces cannot be looked at as an alternative to a fully robust, population-based coin strategy.

Let me just say in closing the most significant name coming out of the first Gulf War, General Norman Schwarzkopf, was reported to have said, you know, the truth is we always know what the right thing is to do. The hard part is doing it.

We know what the right thing to do is here. I think the President clearly articulated the right thing to do. Our job as members of Congress in the days and weeks ahead is to ensure that the resources and the means are there to  carry that through. This is far too important a challenge to once again miss an opportunity. So thank you and I look forward to your questions.

(Applause.)

MR. KRISTOL: Let me just ask you each one question and then take a couple from the floor. I think I will go in reverse order, just to pick up on something you were talking about, Mr. McHugh.

I would say, just as a layman looking at the situation in Afghanistan and having followed Iraq closely, one of the most striking things about Iraq when I went there in the summer of '07 was when you met with General Petraeus and then General Odierno, the Corps Commander, and then with Ambassador Crocker, you had the sense of unity of command, both in terms of the unity of effort between civilians and military and obviously a military chain of command that works in a way that I think historians will record as one of the real achievements in U.S. military history. I think it is a pretty conventional,  common view that that has not been the case either in terms of the military command or the military civilian coordination in Afghanistan.

How much should we worry about that? How much do you think President Obama and, for that matter, General Petraeus can fix this? I mean how big a problem is that for us? You mentioned several other issues of resources and the like, but not that one.

CONGRESSMAN MC HUGH: Well, that's an excellent point. I mean it is one thing to lay a strategy out there, and I think as most people perhaps outside this room look at Iraq they think of a strategy as simply more military forces. And as central and critical as that was, it was a great deal more than that. And the components of it are, by and large, as you define them.

I think the President has defined the larger challenge of that. He speaks of both civilian and military aid on both the Afghan and the Pakistan side; 1.5 billion in civilian aid to the Pakistanis as we go forward. The problem is,  ultimately, how do you coordinate that.

And that really is an on-the-ground adjustment, a fine- tuning of the pistons, as you will. I had a chance to chat with Admiral Mullen yesterday, and my impression is they understand that. They took that lesson from Iraq. They are going to have to make the on-the-ground adjustments that are necessary to fit this same strategy from Iraq, but fit it in different circumstances in Afghanistan.

And, clearly, as President Obama lifted off today in Air Force One to the G20, one of the key objectives, noneconomic, is to have discussions with our allies who are, in all likelihood, going to be asked to step forward on this. So it is a work in progress, but I'm relatively comforted by how the administration has rolled it out thus far.

MR. KRISTOL: Good. Jane, can you comment on that? But also I would just say a word about allies. You were in Munich and talked to our own NATO ambassador and also, of course, to  high-level representatives from the allies.

How much can they do? How much does it matter back home how much they do in terms of political support? And then on the political question, I personally wonder if people are overstating the political risks. I mean at home. And that is to say I think most Republicans are not the ones that jump ship the moment it gets difficult and opportunistically look to take advantage of this and make it Obama's war.

And I also think most Democrats, in fact, are inclined to support their President. But I'm curious as to how you see that going forward. And do you see sort of points of greatest risk or inflection points where the political support could really become dicey?

CONGRESSWOMAN HARMAN: Well, let me comment on what John said and answer that question.

I think the aid mission in Afghanistan is broken, not only the U.S. piece of that, which is broken. Hillary Clinton was pretty articulate  about that yesterday. There is major work to do to coordinate and organize what we are going to do in the nonmilitary piece of our help for Afghanistan.

But internationally it is broken. And one of Richard Holbrooke's assignments, so I understand, is to rationalize this, not just for us, but hopefully to build international support for some well-coordinated aid program. And, you know, it couldn't start sooner. That is a different situation in Iraq. It is just not comparable.

And you are right that the Petraeus/Crocker relationship was unprecedentedly good. And, hopefully, we will get something like that in Afghanistan, but we are not there.

On the other point on political support, it is pretty clear to me that the European public does not understand what NATO is doing in Afghanistan at all. They just don't get the fact that training in the Fatah could lead to -- and I would argue is likely to lead to -- further  attacks in Europe by folks who have been there.

The biggest risk in Europe is in Britain where a huge amount of the population is of Pakistani origin or Pakistani descent, and they take a month's vacation in Pakistan every year. Well, most of them see Grandma, but some of them don't. And they have the right travel documents to come back to Britain. We have already see this movie. But also under the visa-waiver program, guess what. They can come to us as well. There are also Americans training in the tribal area.

So that narrative is not well understood in Europe. There has been huge pressure on governments -- and they responded to it -- not to commit much to the NATO mission. It is very clear -- and you all understand this very well -- that NATO is bifurcated. I wouldn't even say "bifurcated." It is probably 80/20 in terms of what commitments it has made just of its own troops to the military mission in the south of Afghanistan, a very small commitment, but there have been larger commitments of nonmilitary aid.


Our strategy seems to be now to ask for what NATO countries are willing to give. I think that is the pragmatic way forward. I don't know what the moral lesson of that is. NATO is supposed to be one team, one fight, and I don't think it is quite executing that way in Afghanistan.

As far as support here, I think people are lining up to support the President. I agree with John, and I appreciated what he said: That the policy that was articulated Friday is pretty darn sensible. Now we have to see how it plays. But I think if the economy does not improve here -- and there are glacial signs that at least in the mortgage market, something very important to California, it is improving -- but if it doesn't improve, people are going to have no tolerance, regardless of the rest of this, for more money.

And if the mission is not clearly understood here and we have casualties, increasing casualties in Afghanistan, which we will have, that could also lead to a backlash.


So, I agree with you, Bill, and I agree with John that generally there is support right now, and we seem to be on a solid footing. I would hope we will execute this well, and it won't take a lot of time.

I mean my goal -- and by the way, John, I think when you add the 130,000 Afghan troops plus the 80,000 or 90,000 Afghan police, you get to larger numbers faster in the police function. If they can execute it well, it is just as important as the, I think, military role there in terms of providing stability and safety for people.

So it doesn't -- I think we are going to get to large numbers there faster. And they have a history -- this is maybe different from Iraq -- of being very tough, good fighters. So if they are well-trained, I think we are going to see a very different situation than we have seen in Iraq.

CONGRESSMAN MC HUGH: Jane, I agree with you that the difference right now on the police  and army side is the army, by and large, is pretty effective, the ones we have fielded at the eighty-plus thousand. The police are not quite there.

CONGRESSWOMAN HARMAN: I agree. I agree.

CONGRESSMAN MC HUGH: And we have to bring it together. I think we have got to grow both.

CONGRESSWOMAN HARMAN: I agree.

CONGRESSMAN MC HUGH: And all I'm suggesting is that NATO is going to be an important part of that.

And let just add a couple of comments to what you said. I'm deeply concerned about the future of NATO. Afghanistan is a proving ground for it, and to this point it has been a pretty unproductive one. Many of the allies in NATO are now beginning to question their Article V guarantees. That is breathtaking to me, and we have got to go forward and waive -- stop asking. As much as it kind of ignores the shortcomings  momentarily of NATO right now, stop asking for those things that perhaps they can provide but they won't, or those things they can do but they won't, but asking them for things that they can do and they will.

And I think that is why the President has asked and intends to go on the training aspect, because, hopefully, that will be an opportunity to kind of bring it all together. But we are in a very uncertain position on NATO right now, and I am very concerned about it.

MR. KRISTOL: I think I can add one word on an underappreciated benefit of President Obama's all-in or mostly-all-in announcement on Friday. I had dinner with Stephen Harper, the Canadian Prime Minister, Sunday in a pretty small group. And he has been courageous in sticking with the mission and taking along his own party, which is reluctant. They have taken very heavy casualties in the south and have fought very well.

And he said, you know, his life -- I mean, it is still not wildly popular in Canada,  but the fact that President Obama -- not President Bush, but President Obama -- has said this is urgent and this is important is going to make it easier for him to sustain support in Canada.

I have to think some of that would be true in other NATO allies. And it will be interesting to see, I suppose, with President Obama there this week, how much that translates into actions on the ground. It is a test for the alliance.

I think, frankly, those who have a reputation in Europe as good multilateralists and good advocates of the U.S./European relationship -- I know you have done a lot of this actually, Jane -- but they can do a lot over the next few weeks and months to make clear, I think, how damaging it will be back here in terms of U.S. perceptions of NATO and the U.S. weighing of their concerns in a bunch of other areas if on this, which is the core NATO mission of the last several years, if they don't end whatever qualms they had about Iraq and President Bush.


Now it is President Obama saying we have to do this in Afghanistan. I think it is a big test moment for them, and they should understand the implications of not stepping up.

CONGRESSWOMAN HARMAN: Well, we do have just on that point somebody in the Obama inner circle who is very well qualified to push that point. And his name is Jim Jones, who we all know in his last life or a couple back was SACEUR and was instrumental in helping to define some of the modern NATO missions and cares intensely about it. So, hopefully, he will communicate that.

MR. KRISTOL: We have time for just maybe one or two quick questions and quick responses. How about in the back there. Someone had his hand up.

MR. CAMPBELL: Hi, Jason Campbell from Brookings. My question is in regard to metrics. In last week's speech the President was fairly demonstrative in stating that the metrics would provide the American public a tool by which to judge progress in Afghanistan. And if I'm not  mistaken, he also said that there would be some degree of coordination with Congress in determining these metrics.

Congressman Harman, your statement suggests that not only has there been minimal, if any, coordination in determining these metrics, but that the Administration is thus far reluctant to make those public. I guess, first, am I reading this right; and, second, aren't we off to a bad start if Congress out of frustration comes up with a separate set of benchmarks in metrics that may or may not be in line with those of the administration?

CONGRESSWOMAN HARMAN: Well, I don't serve on the Armed Services Committee any longer. John does, so he may know.

CONGRESSMAN MC HUGH: We miss you, Jane. Trust me.

CONGRESSWOMAN HARMAN: Thank you. It was a much better committee when I served on it.

(Laughter.)

CONGRESSMAN MC HUGH: That's why we miss  you.

CONGRESSWOMAN HARMAN: But there has been consultation with the Hill, both with the leadership and with key leaders of committees. So I don't assume that the Congress is in the dark about metrics.

But there has not been -- at least if there was, I missed it -- any very detailed public list of what those metrics are. And in the conversation I had with Mullen this morning -- I saw him in an event that focused mostly on how we treat veterans -- he said that some of this would not be public.

My response to that is, okay, I don't know that every single thing needs to be out there, but surely the public, if we want the public to continue to support this venture, has to have a feeling that it is focused and solid and succeeding. So my response to you is Congress does have a role to play here.

I think even though, as John points out, I'm in the majority party with an administration  of the same party, I think as an independent, as a member of an independent branch of government, it is my responsibility to make certain that my administration, or our administration, is accountable for the policy it sets out.

CONGRESSMAN MC HUGH: I think, by and large, what you posit is correct. But I'm not sure that is a criticism yet. I think, frankly, the question of the benchmarks, at least in my discussions with Admiral Mullen and Secretary Gates, is that, well, we are working on these things, and at the appropriate time we will bring them to Congress. That may not ultimately be the case. If it is not, then I have got a criticism that I need to share with whomever cares to listen.

As you perhaps heard my comments, benchmarks are, I think, appropriate. And I would agree with Jane. I don't think you necessarily have to put out a press release on every one, because then it becomes a political tool. But I don't want that political perspective to change  the dimension of the challenge and change the metrics that we already have on the policy itself.

Again, setting the bar so high you cannot possibly reach it, we fail; we leave. Setting it so low that we uncork the champagne bottles and walk out, even though success has not been achieved.

I suspect that the military folks are thinking about metrics like, well, we have set a bar for 134,000 by the end of 2011 on the Afghan National Army. Did we meet it? If not, again when Congress gets its hands in there, I'm not sure how that all comes out.

So it is a work in progress. We need to be very mindful of it so that benchmarks are fulfilling those good things they can and are intended to do, but we are not authorizing those things that can play a kind of mischievous havoc amongst the mission.

MR. KRISTOL: One more question. Yes?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I have a question for the Congressman and woman.

Afghanistan and Pakistan are both Islamic republics. And I am just wondering if the Islamic nature of these countries figures into your strategies? If not, why not? If so, how?

CONGRESSMAN MC HUGH: I think it has to. I mean on the cultural level, if nothing else, as nearly a 17-year member of the Armed Services Committee, we have started to spend a get deal of time, appropriately so, as to culturally advising our troops from the lowest rank to the highest as to what the realities of that may be.

The second part, of course, is that when you talk about Islamic alignments, you have to refine it beyond that. You have got Sunni, Shiite, you have various subsects of both that have histories behind them. So we do have to be mindful of it.

But still at the end of the day, I think that the counterinsurgency policy that we can read in textbooks, while in need of adjustment to the realities on the ground wherever you are applying it, have to be the overriding consideration. In  Pakistan you have got Islamic concerns against the majorities in India, et cetera, et cetera. So, we can never just shunt that aside. And I think we have to consider it fully as we go forward, but it cannot be militarily the overriding consideration, it seems to me.

CONGRESSWOMAN HARMAN: It is interesting how much we have learned since 9/11. I would say that the ignorance level of Congress while still high is less high by a lot than it was on 9/11. And that certainly includes my ignorance level.

There are lots of Muslim countries in the world, and we have to deal with many of them. I think you could say in both of these countries that the fact that they are Muslim countries is an opportunity. One of the ways in which al-Qaeda in particular has overplayed its hand is it has attacked ruthlessly Muslims.

Part of the change in Iraq, in addition to what we added with the surge, but part of the change was that al-Qaeda overplayed its hands with the Sunnies in Alhambra, and that turned a large  number of the population against al-Qaeda. I think al-Qaeda and certainly Lashkar-e-Taiha is overplaying its hand in Pakistan right now. The attack yesterday is a perfect example of this.

And so there is the opportunity with a counterinsurgency strategy to work with Muslim leadership in these countries against, you know, this toxic piece of their own population.

So,I think we will be more successful and their countries will be stronger if we understand that that is what happening. That the moderate Muslim world -- and there is a moderate Muslim word -- is threatened in many countries by this extremist element, and that they have a huge role to play in defeating it. And that really is the subplot in Afghanistan. It is that this country has to win its own victory. And we have to help enable it to do that.

CONGRESSMAN MC HUGH: I agree.

MR. KRISTOL: Thank you very much, Jane and John. If all of our elected officials had your degree of seriousness and wisdom, we would be  in slightly better shape than we are in, and I am heartened personally by this panel, and I know we all very much enjoyed it and appreciate your taking the time. Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

(Brief recess.)

Fourth Panel

DR. KAGAN: We are now to the much anticipated part of this discussion on Afghanistan today. I hope you will all join me in welcoming Senator John McCain.

(Applause.)

SENATOR MC CAIN: Every place I go everybody comes up says I voted for you, I voted for you. I guess I should demand a recount.

(Laughter.)

SENATOR MC CAIN: Thank you for your kind offer.

DR. KAGAN: Thank you for very much for joining me today. I know it is a busy time for the Congress with all kinds hearings, but there is awful lot going on in the world, so we are grateful for the opportunity to talk to you about them. And the subject for the conference today, as you know, is Afghanistan, and we are all talking about the recent plans set forth by President Barack Obama.

If you missed the first two panels because you perhaps were not here, I just want you to know that there has been a love fest, it has been a bipartisan love fest the whole time we have been here. And I just want you to -- you know, if you want to break that up, you are welcome to.

But I guess -- I think the question probably a lot of people would want to know is, there was a lot of talk about Afghanistan during the campaign. You put forth a plan; Senator Obama put effort a plan. I wonder if you were in his shoes right now, how different would your plan look from the one he has set forth?

SENATOR MC CAIN: The foreign policy initiative is a great beginning, I know you had great panels and its now upon the senate for national security issues across our country. We are all full of great challenge.

And I mentioned that I was in Brussels at a conference over the weekend, and Bob did a particularly spectacular job of panel. He really did a good job. I support the plan that our panel  members mentioned earlier today. I probably would have done a few things differently.

One and most importantly emphasize -- and the President did, but I think he really has to emphasize how difficult this challenge is and that as with the surge that will be increasing to reassert control of that campaign. Including the challenge. So we will and can and must succeed, but it is not going to be easy.

But it may not be the end of our awakening as far as the overall strategy used to attract Taliban and other extremists to our side. It may not be. By the way, it is not as tough as Iraq. Don't let anybody tell you that it is, because when we started the surge Iraq was virtually in a state of collapse. You look at all of the parameters that judge how you are doing in a conflict Iraq was the tougher than this issue is, although it has its own setting.

The second thing I would have done, probably, is went ahead and announced the overall condition of our troops, rather then be accused of  a Lyndon Johnson instrumentalist because it is very clear what General McKiernan asked for, even though it may not be right away, I would have probably gone ahead and announced that we intend to do that.

And I guess third of all, I think it is very important that we continue to consult with Congress and with the leaders of both side to of the aisle to prevent a sort of a resurgence of an antiwar activity situation. I would have announced a dramatic increase in the Afghan army. I am talking about up to 200, 250,000 person army with a country population and we need the exercise of the army.

And those are just some of the areas that perhaps I would have emphasized differently. Overall I appreciate the president's strategy. I appreciate the fact that there is many of our military leaders who are the formulation of this strategy.

DR. KAGAN: I think -- I don't want to speak for the Obama Administration, although I  usually do.

(Laughter.)

DR. KAGAN: They probably would have said, look, we indeed have the economic crisis so the very over this thing with natural strong thing of course they didn't bite off maybe more than the American public and Congress can chew. I think that would be their -- that might be their argument.

I guess the question is how deep is the support in Congress in both analysis in both parties? There have been a little bit of a debate today as to whether there might be a weakening of support, casualties are going to go up inevitably if the economic crisis does not resolve itself in some way.

How thin or deep would you say the support is on both sides of the aisle?

SENATOR MC CAIN: I think that it is problematic as to what transpires. I think a year from now we are looking at a tougher fight than we are today. And it is hard for me to gauge, but I  do believe that there is a better understanding of the reasons why we are in Afghanistan. We have not forgotten 9/11; we have not forgotten the terrible abuses that the Taliban inflicted; and we are, I think, aware more of what is at stake here than perhaps we were in Iraq.

And General Petraeus as and our military leaders probably have been enhanced in their prestige on the part of the American people and members of Congress because of the success of the strategy in Iraq. But it is hard to know. But I don't think there is any doubt that a year from now we will be looking at a greater opposition -- level of opposition to the war than we are seeing today.

DR. KAGAN: There is some concern some Republicans will say, look, this is Obama's war now; he did this increase, we wash our hands of it. It would not be the first time a political party has done something like that.

SENATOR MC CAIN: I think that is possible, but I don't think it is very likely,  honestly, because I think the Republicans are very well aware, particularly that people like Dick Lugar and many others that are highly respected in the Republican party are supportive. I think it is more problematic with the Democratic leadership.

We all know the Speaker comes from a very liberal district. We know that Harry Reid has been very nervous about troop levels in Iraq as well as the strategy for Afghanistan. But I don't -- I guess what I worry most about is Americans have not been sufficiently alerted to the difficulties that we are going to face here.

DR. KAGAN: Do you have a certain amount of sympathy for the President? Do you agree with his assessment and many assessments that the President Bush Administration had seriously under resourced the effort in Afghanistan?

SENATOR MC CAIN: I think that the Bush Administration had under resourced for good and bad reasons. The good reason is because we simply were short of sufficient troops to do both Iraq  and Afghanistan, which argues, by the way, for a permanent and large increase in the army and marine corps.

This world is a long way from peaceful. And five years from now or two or three years from now, we may be looking at very different challenges, maybe in different parts of the world. I pray not, but I think we have to be prepared for that.

I think that we made mistakes in the command structure. I think we made mistakes in not, perhaps, being more -- more scrutiny of the Karzai government and some of the corruption that exists. I think we didn't put enough emphasis on expanding the Iraq -- Afghan army. So, I think that some responsibility can be borne by the Bush Administration.

DR. KAGAN: The President, as you know in his statement I think he must have mentioned -- he must have repeated about five times that the reason we have not done the right thing in Afghanistan was directly because of Iraq. You  seem to be in some agreement with that?

SENATOR MC CAIN: I'm in some agreement, but I also think that we probably could have or have reason to be disappointed in the lack of participation -- good participation on the part of our allies. We probably should have streamlined the command structure. We were disappointed by some of the commitments made for training police and judiciary that did not happen.

And so, I think that the Bush Administration bears some responsibility, but I think it is also time for us to look forward.

I would also argue that if we had retreated in defeat from Iraq, the challenge in Afghanistan would be immensely magnified. It was vital that we succeed in Iraq, once we were in there. We can argue whether we should have gone in, I will be glad to have that debate and discussion, but if we had failed and had withdrawn as, say, a large number of, quote, experts said that they want us to do, the challenge in Afghanistan would have been vastly magnified.

DR. KAGAN: You raise the issue of our allies, and you were just in Brussels listening to some of our allies talk about these issues. Obviously, Secretary Hillary Clinton is now in The Hague talking to allies about their contribution. What do you expect from our allies, and do you think they are going to meet your expectations in terms of assisting in Afghanistan?

SENATOR MC CAIN: I think it is important that President Obama has an enormous reservoir of goodwill in Europe. I think you will see that manifested by the people's enthusiasm for his first visit as President of the United States. I think he can translate that goodwill into larger commitments on the part of our allies.

I have to be very honest with you, though, I think that additional troops provided by our allies is not very likely, and certainly not in any significant number. When we were in Brussels, I met with the Canadian defense minister. Four Canadian soldiers had been gravely wounded that day. That has a tremendous effect on  public opinion in a small country, and Canada is a small country. And we are very grateful for what they have done.

But I think that rather than, perhaps, asking for things that we are not going to get, like troop increases, we ought to ask for those things, including the reserve fund, to train and equip a dramatically increased Afghanistan army, including training of police and the judiciary.

We all know the police are corrupt in Afghanistan. Everybody knows that. And it is an integral part of any successful strategy to have a police that is effective and respected.

So, I think there is a lot of areas where they can and will be of assistant to us. And I think the President will probably succeed, perhaps beyond some of our expectations, at least I hope so.

DR. KAGAN: Do you worry that there could be, as some people have raised today, including myself, that there could be a backlash brewing in the United States if it is perceived  that as America ramps up its military commitment to Afghanistan, the ratio of American to European forces really rises fairly dramatically? Will there be some resentment in the United States that American is carrying too heavy a load compared to its allies?

SENATOR MC CAIN: Throughout the Cold War all the way back as far as I can remember, there have been complaints about the United States having to bear the majority of the burden. That is unfortunately and in some way fortunately the obligations that go with being the world superpower. And I regret that we don't get more help from our allies. I regretted it during the entire Cold World. And I have regretted it -- but those are realities associated with the participation or lack of by our allies.

Our allies have intentionally reduced their defense spending to a level that makes them far more focused on diplomacy than on the use of military force. That is just a reality that we have to deal with. At the same time, I'm very  grateful for the British, I am very grateful for the Canadians, I am very grateful for many of our allies who have made significant contribution. And maybe we are not grateful enough from time to time as we should be.

DR. KAGAN: You also mentioned about --

SENATOR MC CAIN: Let me mention one other thing if I could real quick. If our allies and nations in the region know that we are there until we succeed, then I think that has an impact on their willingness or lack of willingness to participate as well.

This business of always, we have got to have an exit strategy, we have to have an exit strategy, we have got to have a date certain. My friends, the date certain comes sooner when we have convinced both our enemies and our friends that we will succeed, that we will not allow Afghanistan to evolve into a base for terrorist attacks on the United States of America and a place of chaos and disintegration. That is the quickest way to victory.

DR. KAGAN: You raised the question of the problem of insufficient just overall military capability during the Bush years when we were engaged in both Iraq and Afghanistan. What about now? It seems to me the pressure in Congress on both sides of the aisle is to reduce the defense budget, and so, I don't understand how we can square that with an increase commitment in the Afghanistan and a continuing commitment in Iraq.

SENATOR MC CAIN: I think it is very tough to square the present budget proposal with the size of the military, our commitment in Afghanistan and our gradual withdrawal from Iraq. I think it is an unrealistic assessment, particularly, again, looking at the situation in world.

I do not predict any kind of conflict with China, but it should disturb us a bit when a U.S. Navy ship in international waters is surrounded by Chinese -- I don't know what you want to call them -- vessels. So there is tensions that can only be addressed, I think, both  through good diplomacy and furthering good relations, but also a military capability that is one which serves as a deterrence to adventurism and misbehavior in any part of the world.

DR. KAGAN: As you are suggesting, there is always a tradeoff between current capabilities to deal with the conflicts that we are currently in and facing potential problems that are maybe 10 or 20 years down the road. I think under Rumsfeld there was a great prejudice in favor of worrying about the 20 years down road and perhaps under resourcing the immediate conflicts.

I wonder whether we are now in the midst of a shift toward focusing on the immediate conflicts and maybe killing -- and I think this is an issue that you have talked about -- killing some weapons programs that really are looking forward to conflicts that we have not even thought about having yet?

SENATOR MC CAIN: Could I mention also that we look back and we want to place blame and responsibility, and a certainly amount of that is  appropriate so that we don't repeat the mistakes. But I would argue that we, to some degree, squandered the, quote, peace dividend during the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall and our expectation that we were at the end of history.

And back to the budget for one second here. I don't see how you could have a reduction and still acquire some of the weapons systems we need to. Classic example of our forward thinking and yet mistakes at the same time is a futures combat systems.

The army's proposal, which is now up, I believe, to $130 billion, and we still have not got the first operational aspect of it, which was going to provide us with our equipment for future conflicts and actually it is stalled out. You could make that same argument about other weapons systems, including the Joint Strike Fighter.

So we are going to have to regain some of the balance between affordable and doable weapons systems, but at the same time not have the kinds of cost overruns. Defense procurement  reform, which I share priority with the President, is an absolute requirement.

Finally, could I just give you a practical example. I was talking about it with General Petraeus yesterday. The first and second battles of Fallujah were not very much different than the battle of old. We had marines go in, an army go in, house-to-house fighting, people shooting from the rooftops, having to blow up houses, et cetera, and we paid a very heavy price in both the second battles of Fallujah.

Look at the battle of Sauder City, get a briefing on the battle of Sauder City. We were able to use technology to an incredible degree to, as General Petraeus put it, make our enemies take a knee, because we punished them every time their heads popped up. Every time they tried to fire a rocket, every time they tried to assassinate somebody, our surveillance and intelligence capabilities, ranking from the most rudimentary where people were informing on a person-to-person basis, to the best kind of high technology which  would track them whenever they went and hunt them down.

So there is a great virtue in technology advances in warfare, but you have got to match the technology to the challenge, rather than just the technology for the technology sake. I know that that is a bit of a complicated answer, but that is the challenge of combating future enemies is having technology match the threat, rather than technology for technology sake.

DR. KAGAN: Let's move from Afghanistan to Pakistan, which the whole thing is called Af-Pak, I am told. And the premise of Af-Pak is that there is no solving Afghanistan without solving Pakistan or there is no solving Pakistan without solving Afghanistan or one of those. But what is your view of Pakistan?

That did also come up during the campaign. Now we have a situation where people think that things are getting worse in Pakistan, we have expanding drone attacks. What are your thoughts about Pakistan and the way -- well, not  only the way the Administration is handling it, but the way anybody would have to handle it?

SENATOR MC CAIN: I think the attack on the police academy yesterday was an indicator that the extremists have a significant capability. The attack in Mumbai was an incredibly sophisticated operation, and it didn't get more attention in the United States because it didn't happen in the United States.

But when you look at that attack and the way they orchestrated, ten people were able to virtually paralyze that city for, I think, about 24 or 36 hours. I have forgotten. And this attack yesterday on a police academy is another example of people that are willing to die but not as suicide bombers, they want to take a whole lot of people with them before they go. That is a shift in tactics and strategy on the part of terrorists and one that we are going to have to learn to cope with.

I believe that Pakistan by itself is a vital nation -- security interest to the United  States of America. They are a nuclear armed country; they have a very large population; their geographic situation, all of it argues for a Pakistan strategy for Pakistan alone.

Now, is Pakistan important and very important as far as our ability to succeed in Afghanistan? Yes. But this notion that you cannot succeed in Afghanistan without a success in Pakistan, to a large degree, I don't subscribe to.

We were able to succeed in Iraq with Iranians sending in the most lethal IEDs, the Syrians being a transhipment point for suicide bombers, and we never had to fight the Iranians. And we obviously, by our success is exactly what reduced the activities from both Iran and to a large degree, eliminated to some degree from Syria.

So we can succeed. It would be a lot harder and a lot tougher, but we need a strategy that involves both countries, but we also need a separate strategy as regards to Pakistan by itself. And I don't have to tell anybody in this  room the political turmoil and the problems with the ISI all of those. But the fact is that Pakistan still does have an elected government and a stumbling but functioning democracy. And I don't see signs that the military wants to take over Pakistan again for good reasons and practical reasons.

DR. KAGAN: What about the idea of conditioning aide to the military and to Pakistan on the basis of their performance?

SENATOR MC CAIN: I am always nervous about that, because if you point a gun at somebody, you better be prepared to pull the trigger. I think Kahani is a good leader. I worry, and we all continue to worry about the penetration of the ISI and the interlocking relationship between the military and the ISI as well. But I think we ought to do everything we can to further democracy, I think encourage stability, encourage cooperation.

I would like for us to go up -- not cross the line between persuasion and threats of  withdrawing our assistance and our involvement with Pakistan, because I don't think we can -- I don't think we could do that. At the same time a careful balance of persuasion and showing the Pakistan government and people that it is in their interest for us to succeed in Afghanistan and in the border areas and now in other parts of Pakistan as well.

And I think we can do that because every election that is held in Pakistan extremists are rejected that are on the ballot. It is not that they have this large base of popular support. They don't, even in the areas where the Taliban and other extremist organizations have control.

So, it is not as if we are facing a Pakistani public opinion that is anything but in pursuit of the same goals that we share.

DR. KAGAN: Those that have made the argument that the drone attacks themselves undermine Pakistani support for American objectives, what is your view on that?

SENATOR MC CAIN: My view is that it is  probably -- and I'm glad I'm not part of the Administration -- it is probably a wise thing to do, particularly when we can specifically identify these people. And it is part of an overall strategy, but it is only a part.

I remind you that we what we had 120,000 troops in Iraq, and every night and even every day we were going out and we were killing off bad people and their leadership. And everybody would say, boy, that is great, we killed off the local al-Qaeda or whichever group it was leadership, whoever it was. And yet we were losing. We were losing even though we were able to, through intelligence and our drones, et cetera, kill off some of these people.

So, it cannot be the only strategy is what I'm saying. I think it should probably be done, but don't think it is the strategy that they will achieve success.

DR. KAGAN: I will ask just one final question then open it up to the audience. We are now engaged in a lot of discussions with a lot of  regional players, we have a regional approach. If you go around the periphery of Afghanistan and look at some of the major powers there, who wants to be helpful and who doesn't want to be helpful? If you look at Russia, Iran, Pakistan and some of the others, do you think that they all want to try -- India, do they all want to try to be helpful in Afghanistan?

SENATOR MC CAIN: I think some of them are very ambivalent, and let's talk about Iran, for example. I don't think the Iranians want the Taliban to take over Afghanistan. At the same time, they obviously take great pleasure in seeing us in difficulties there. So I think they are kind of ambivalent about it, very unlike their approach to Iraq.

The Russians, again, there is a bit of pragmatism there with the Russians, but they have had their problems with Islamic extremists and they certainly would not, I don't think, like to see a Taliban dominated government.

I think they, in the case of Pakistan,  their economic difficulties which are deep and severe right now, are exacerbating all of their problems. And that is why I support this aid and assistance -- economic aid and assistance to Pakistan right now. And with the precondition that much of that money will be wasted -- I'm sorry -- and we will do everything we can to have it accounted for and everything, but there will be stories on the front page of newspapers about some of the corruption and some of the problems that are associated with it.

So India is very interesting, in my view, because there is a view in Pakistan that the Indians are taking control of the economy and forging close alliances with Afghanistan. I don't think that is true. But there is that belief and part of it is based on this deep-seated animosity that exists between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Which reminds me that still if you ask the majority of the Pakistani people and military, they would probably say that the greater threat to their security is still India as opposed to  Afghanistan, which then makes it understandable some of their lack of movement of troops, lack of efforts, significant efforts to a reassert control in certain parts of the border areas.

So the relations with Afghan's neighbors are complex but I think that if we begin to succeed in Afghanistan and restore control and then all of the things that follow that, then I think their neighbors will behave in a more responsible fashion.

DR. KAGAN: Thank you. I probably have hogged up too much time. We have time for one or two questions, and two if the first one is brief.

Yes, sir.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I have a question about Afghanistan's government. How should we encourage the Karzai Administration or another successor if he is booted out in August, to be more effective, to be less corrupt and to generally improve their the country? What are your thoughts?

SENATOR MC CAIN: I think we all know  that right now, anyway, there is not a viable opponent or strong opponent to President Karzai. Now, one may emerge. There is certainly great dissatisfaction in parts of Afghanistan towards the government, and we all know about the corruption situation.

So, I don't envision a scenario right now where President Karzai would be defeated. A lot of things happen in politics.

But if he were, then I think we would obviously forge -- try to forge a new and productive relationship.

I would like to remind you that -- again, going back to the one of my former experiences, if you look at Vietnam, the assassination of Diem was a seminal moment. And it meant really a lack of support for the government, a lack of an effective government. We had a revolving door of generals running Saigon.

So we want to be careful about how we approach the Karzai situation and certainly not, in my view, interfere in what is really a domestic  election in Afghanistan.

DR. KAGAN: Yes, sir?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Senator, do you believe that the heart and the brains of our adversaries are in Pakistan not in Afghanistan?

SENATOR MC CAIN: I think the heart and brains of our adversaries are literally all over the world. I think that they are Islamic extremists that have a goal of imposing their will and their brand of the Koran which is not in keeping with, obviously, the majority of people of Muslim faith, obviously. And that they view Afghanistan as a place where that could further those aims and goals.

Their goals are not just confined to Afghanistan. They are confined to taking on with a view as the enemy and that is the people and governments and countries of the rest of the world. But I believe a lot of the talent probably is residing in parts of Pakistan right now.

DR. KAGAN: Thank you, Senator. Once again, you have shown that you are a pillar of  wisdom and clarity in a world that needs a lot of that, and we are very grateful for the time that you have spent with us today.

(Applause.)